Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

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W I D OW S A N D S U I TO R S I N E A R LY MODERN ENGLISH COMEDY

The courtship and remarriage of a rich widow was a popular motif in early modern comic theatre. Jennifer Panek brings together a wide variety of texts, from ballads and jest-books to sermons and court records, to examine the staple widow of comedy in her cultural context and to examine early modern attitudes to remarriage. She persuasively challenges the current critical tendency to see the stereotype of the lusty widow as a tactic to dissuade women from second marriages, arguing instead that it was deployed to enable her suitors to regain their masculinity, under threat from the dominant, wealthier widow. The theatre, as demonstrated by Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher and others, was the prime purveyor of a fantasy in which a young man’s sexual mastery of a widow allowed him to seize the economic opportunity she offered. j e nni f e r pa n ek is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She has previously held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University, and has published in such journals as Studies in English Literature, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Comparative Drama.

W I D OW S A N D S U I TO R S I N E A R LY M O D E R N ENGLISH COMEDY J E N N I F E R PA N E K

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521832717 © Jennifer Panek 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 - -

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For Matthew

Contents

Acknowledgments A note on texts

page viii x

Introduction

1

1 The widow’s choice: female remarriage in early modern England

13

2 The widow’s threat: domestic government and male anxiety

46

3 The suitor’s fantasy: courtship and compensation

77

4 The husband’s fear: the lusty widow as wife

124

5 A playwright’s response: four Middletonian remarriage plots

157

Notes Works cited Index

202 222 237

vii

Acknowledgments

My first thanks are due to the people who saw the earliest version of this book through the dissertation process at the University of Toronto: Leslie Thomson, Anne Lancashire, and Julian Patrick, who gave me not only an exemplary thesis committee, but a source of continued advice and support. Alexander Leggatt and Helen Ostovich, in their capacity as internal and external dissertation examiners, offered constructive suggestions; so too did Peter Blayney, who fortunately came as part of the package when Leslie signed on as my advisor. Conversations with Barbara Todd were tremendously useful in the early stages of the project: despite our different views on certain points, her interest and helpfulness are warmly remembered. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded both my doctoral and postdoctoral research: for support in the latter, thanks are due to Anne Lancashire (again), Marjorie Garber, who generously added a postdoctoral supervision to her busy schedule, and Mary HalpennyKillip, who made me feel at home at Harvard’s Humanities Center. The Renaissance Graduate Colloquium provided stimulating discussion and some truly spectacular dinners; Edie Snook provided an understanding listener and excellent company. Christina Luckyj, best of mentors and best of friends, read the entire manuscript; her scholarly counsel is surpassed only by her wisdom on matters non-professional. Jerry Singerman, both during and after his excellent “Getting Published” seminar at the 2001 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) conference, was a greatly appreciated source of tips on negotiating the road to publication. Jerry Sokol, who kindly allowed me access to his work before it was published, read and offered advice on “the legal bits” – any remaining errors there or elsewhere are wholly my own. For the opportunity to share portions of my work in progress, I thank the open submissions selection committee for the 1999 SAA conference. I also thank John Astington and Domenico Pietropaolo, organizers of the “Shakespeare, Authorship, and the Canon” conference (October 2000) viii

Acknowledgments

ix

at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama; there I had the benefit of conversations with Paul Yachnin, possibly the world’s only other scholar interested in The Puritan Widow. Loreen Giese, who chaired the seminar “Literary and Social Practices of Courtship and Marriage in Early Modern England” at the 2000 SAA conference, provided useful information about the London Metropolitan Archives. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book contain material originally published in Comparative Drama 34.3 (2000): 321–344; I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint. Victoria Cooper, my editor at Cambridge University Press, was unfailingly helpful, and the book profited greatly from the comments of its two anonymous readers. Mary Arseneau and Helena Merriam helped me substantially through the process of indexing. Stephen Orgel’s good deed did not go unpunished; nor does it go unappreciated. Friends and colleagues in the English department at the University of Ottawa have offered enthusiasm and encouragement, and, at one point, a very welcome course release: special thanks to Victoria Burke, Irene Makaryk, David Rampton, David Staines, Andrew Taylor, and Keith Wilson. I also owe a great deal to former teachers and professors Allan Romkema, Judith Weil, and David Williams. One couldn’t write books if it weren’t for the people who give you a life outside of them: I thank my parents, George and Joyce Panek, for their love and support; my sister Joy Panek; Kim Brown and Dan Wruck, who have stood by me for a startling number of years; Lynne Bowker, Heather Cullen, Chantel Lavoie, Jenny McKenney and Clifton Cunningham, Elaine Ostry, Heather Walsh, and Sarah Winters, good friends all. This book is dedicated to my partner, Matthew Kellett, with more love and gratitude than I could otherwise express.

A note on texts

Original spellings have been preserved, but I have used brackets to expand contractions and have modernized u/v and i/j. Unless otherwise noted, all italics within quotations are original.

x

Introduction

On the night of the nineteenth of November in 1628, a young widow by the name of Elizabeth Bennett was asleep in her house in the London parish of St. Olave. Only seven months earlier, the Widow Bennett had lost her husband Richard, a wealthy Mercer who had made his wife sole executrix of his estate and heir to two-thirds of it, including their fine house in the Old Jewry and a coach with four horses. As a widow worth £20,000, Elizabeth was already besieged by suitors. On that November night, however, one of them – a physician named John Raven – figured he would get the jump on the others. He bribed Elizabeth’s servants to let him into her bedchamber, whereupon, in the words of the diarist John Rous, the widow awoke to find Dr. Raven “put[ting] his legge into the bedde” (34). It appears, though, that not much more of Dr. Raven than his “legge” made it into the widow’s bed, for when she realized who it was, she cried out “Thieves!” and “Murder!” and proceeded to have her over-eager suitor hauled off to the constable.1 Perhaps the doctor’s medical training had something to do with why he thought the widow would respond to his methods: “what shall we say,” writes Nicholas Fontanus in The Woman’s Doctor (1652), concerning Widowes, who lye fallow, and live sequestered from these Venerous conjunctions? we must conclude, that if they be young, of a black complexion, and hairie, and are likewise somewhat discoloured in their cheeks, that they have a spirit of salacity, and feele within themselves a frequent titillation, their seed being hot and prurient, doth irritate and inflame them to Venery. (6)

The Elizabethan composer and serial widow-wooer Thomas Whythorne reveals in his memoirs (c. 1576) that any learned assumptions about a widow’s “hot and prurient” seed merely complemented conventional wisdom. As a young music teacher and servingman to a widowed gentlewoman, Whythorne seems to have inhabited the opposite end of the spectrum from Raven as far as audacious courtship went; in fact, he confesses that “if it came to making of love by word, sign, or deed, especially in deed . . . I had 1

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

no more face to do that than a sheep” (24). However, he came to the same conclusions as the doctor did about what catches a widow’s fancy. Though offended by the gentlewoman’s witticisms about how she “would fain have [her] man to be in love with [her]” (29), he records that he prudently kept himself in her “good will,” intending to “make the most of her that I could to serve my turn” (33–34): I . . . was very serviceable to please her; and also would sometimes be pleasant and merry, and also somewhat bold with her. After the which times, she would sometimes tell me in a scoffing manner that I was but a huddypick, and lacked audacity. But I, not construing those words so then, as they did proceed from one who did know her game, or else had learned that, as he that wooeth a maid must be brave in apparel and outward show, so he that wooeth a widow must not carry quick eels in his codpiece, but show some proof that he is stiff before, did think her show of love and liberality bestowed upon me was but to feed her humour. . . (43)

When Whythorne was later rebuffed by another widow, one whom he courted in earnest, he wondered again whether she would have treated him differently had he heeded the proverb advising that “he that wooeth a maid must go trick and trim and in fine apparel; but he that wooeth a widow must go stiff before” (156). “I promise you,” he adds hastily, “so was I stiff. But yet, considering that the time was not like to be long to the wedding day . . . and I, loving her, meant not to attempt any dishonesty unto her, for a sinful fact it had been, till we had been married” (156). Ultimately, the circumspect Whythorne had no more success than the presumptuous Raven, for the second widow took exception to his plan to wait three weeks between betrothal and wedding, and called off the match; Raven’s widow Bennett, for her part, found a far more illustrious second husband in Sir Heneage Finch, the Recorder of London – the very man, incidentally, before whom Raven had appeared in court to answer for his nocturnal visit. The unsuccessful romantic escapades of a Caroline doctor and an Elizabethan music teacher provide a useful starting point for a study of the remarrying widow in early modern English comedy, if only for the fact that both men evidently took seriously the stereotype of the lusty widow,2 that familiar figure who can be traced back through Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Classical literature, most famously Petronius’s tale of the Ephesian widow who succumbs to a soldier in her husband’s tomb. Widespread and persistent as the “lusty widow” may be, though, she is neither static nor ahistorical. While sexual appetite provides a common thread, Chaucer’s affectionately satirized Alisoun of Bath, five-times married fourteenth-century Englishwoman, is obviously not the same as La Veuve, her vicious and

Introduction

3

unsavoury French counterpart in Gautier Le Leu’s fabliau; both differ from the young widow Do˜na Endrina, heroine of a lasciviously comic episode in the Medieval Castilian Libro de Buen Amor, who in turn bears little resemblance to the vile, sexually rapacious old women who crop up in Roman invective or Aristophanic comedy. The widely re-told story of the widow of Ephesus fulfills one function in the erotic free-for-all context of Petronius’s Satyricon, where all women – and most men – are equally debauched, and another in the moralized fourteenth-century French version by Jehan Le F`evre, which concludes with the soldier reviling the widow for her treatment of her husband’s corpse; the Jacobean audience of The Widow’s Tears (1604),3 George Chapman’s dramatization of the same tale, encountered a decidedly different widow than the Restoration readers of John Ogilby’s narrative poem The Ephesian Matron (1688), a royalist allegory in which the widow represents Britain and her dead husband – Oliver Cromwell – gets what he deserves.4 The lusty widow, for all her apparent timelessness and universality, is culturally contingent. One might note then, that Raven and Whythorne did not merely assume that the widows they courted had heightened sexual appetites: they incorporated that assumption – or worried about their failure to incorporate it – into their courtship tactics. And one might also note that in doing so, they resemble a league of fictional suitors on the early modern English stage – characters like Tharsalio in Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears, Bould in Nathan Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611), or Ricardo in Thomas Middleton’s The Widow (1616) – who accost the widows they wish to marry with bawdy insinuations, frank sexual boasts, and on more than one occasion, physical aggression. The wealthy widow, the bevy of suitors, the courtships tinged with lust, aggression, and trickery, and the triumph of one man – usually young, virile, and poor – over his rivals, are stock characters and situations in early seventeenth-century comedy, with a popularity that suggests they offered at least a segment of contemporary playgoers some particular satisfaction. Part of my project, then, is to ask a deceptively simple question – why is the early modern widow assumed to be lusty? – and to ignore the seemingly obvious biological (and tautological) explanation furnished by Fontanus. This question’s relevance, I might add, becomes all too clear when one realizes that a modern social historian can still draw on the lusty widow stereotype to explain a higher bridal pregnancy rate among eighteenth-century French widows than among first-time brides, claiming that “it is to be presumed that the reason for this enormous discrepancy is that the libido of widows had been aroused by their first marriage, and that they were therefore more willing than young virgins to risk pre-marital

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

sex, since they enjoyed it and missed it more” (Stone 609). Starting from my own more cautious assumption that the actual sexual desires of real-life early modern widows must have varied beyond the power of generalization, I want to explore the ideological work that this stereotype performed for the men who constructed it. When a woman emerged, at her husband’s death, from the patriarchal control of coverture, why did men find it in their interest to deploy the fiction of her inordinate sexual appetite? As the comedies of the period invite us to pay as much attention to the widow’s suitors as to the widow herself, what can we learn about early modern constructions of masculinity through the desires, fantasies, and anxieties of the men who sought to replace under coverture a woman with sexual and marital experience, their independent legal equal, and, frequently, their financial superior? To answer these questions, and to uncover what was at stake in theatrical representations of the remarrying widow and her suitors, it is necessary to go beyond two standards which have conventionally governed critical inquiry on this topic: social history and Shakespeare. While the work of historians such as Jeremy Boulton, Vivian Brodsky Elliott, Amy Erickson, and Barbara Todd is invaluable for grounding the literary scholar in the facts of remarriage – rates and intervals, husbands’ wills and widows’ property, the kinds of men widows chose to marry, and the premarital settlements they contracted with them – the use of social history to explore dramatic representations of widows has frequently given rise to the kind of literary criticism which seeks to compare stage widows to their real-life counterparts, usually with the scope of examining the playwright’s “accuracy” or “sympathy.”5 But there are limits on the value of judging saleable dramatic fantasies by how well they measure up to real-life situations (or rather, to the remaining textual traces of those situations). Moreover, social historians pursue a discipline that does not necessarily include an avid interest in what Catherine Belsey has termed “history at the level of the signifier” or “cultural history”: the kind of history in which the theatre participates and by which it is informed. “Cultural history,” writes Belsey, records meanings and values, which is to say that its concern is not so much what individuals actually did, but more what people wanted to do, wished they had done, what they cared about and deplored. . . . Where practices feature in cultural history, they do so primarily in terms of their meanings – as customs or habits, for example, which demonstrate the values a culture subscribes to. (6)

Where the remarrying widow and her suitors feature most prominently in this “decisively textual” kind of history is in the drama – one of the many

Introduction

5

genres of fiction which contribute to “the signifying practices of a society” (Belsey, 8) – but the meaning of these staged courtships and marriages is inseparable from the representation of remarriage in other contemporary texts: popular fictions such as ballads, poems, jests, or prose tales; instructive literature like conduct books, sermons, or legal manuals; and a wide variety of genres which problematize the very distinction between fiction and non-fiction: memoirs and autobiographies, books of “characters,” didactic anecdotes, satires, court depositions. If it is axiomatic that any reconstruction of the past is necessarily situated in the present, that we cannot know how early modern women and men would have actually responded to these texts, and that what is extant and accessible provides a mere sliver of the culture they inhabited, it is nonetheless both possible and practical to base our interpretations – of widow-wooing comedies, of the lusty widow stereotype, of playgoers’ tastes and suitors’ behavior – upon as wide a range of texts and as full an understanding of the culture as possible. To do otherwise is to risk misinterpretation, or to represent only part of the story as the whole. A range of texts, however, necessarily includes a range of playwrights, and the story of the remarrying widow is one to which new historicist and cultural materialist criticism’s predilection for Shakespeare has not done justice.6 Nearly all the well-known theatrical names of the first quarter of the seventeenth century produced at least one comic remarryingwidow plot: Chapman, Jonson, and Rowley wrote two apiece; Beaumont and Fletcher, two, and Fletcher, alone, one; Middleton turned out an astonishing seven; Dekker, Massinger, Brome, Field, Cooke, and Barry all tried their hands at one, and Haughton contributed a widow subplot to the collaborative Patient Grissil (1600).7 Despite this wealth of plays, though, critical attention to the remarrying widow has been extremely limited; comic plots of remarriage do not seem to have interested Shakespeare, and the best-known remarrying widows, accordingly, are the tragic figure of Gertrude in Hamlet (c. 1600) and, perhaps by generic association, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.8 Under the influence of these two tragedies, a certain set of scholarly assumptions about the early modern widow and a particular interpretation of the lusty widow stereotype have become current. The problem is that these assumptions render the non-Shakespearean comedies – not to mention the behavior of those contemporary gentlemen, Raven and Whythorne – downright mystifying. To begin with, there is a prevailing notion among both literary critics and social historians that men who courted widows were trying to persuade these women to take a step that contravened their society’s ideas of virtue:

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

widespread moral opposition to the posthumous infidelity of female remarriage is generally assumed to be a facet of the culture’s overall patriarchal suppression of women’s sexuality and freedom of choice. While a few critics, notably Frank Wadsworth and Lila Geller, have pointed out that after the Reformation, remarriage for widows was sanctioned by Protestant doctrine and was therefore far from universally condemned, the pervasiveness of the belief that Elizabethan and Jacobean society frowned on female remarriage is indicated by the fact that Geller’s 1991 article must argue against its influence on criticism of Thomas Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (1615) thirty-five years after Wadsworth undertook the same task for John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614). Some recent criticism, moreover, has countered that Protestant doctrinal orthodoxies were not necessarily coherent with popular beliefs and practices. Dorothea Kehler, for instance, observes that although English reformed clerics distanced themselves from the Catholic valorization of celibacy by officially approving of remarriage, popular resistance to female remarriage remained largely unchanged. As an example of “persistent conventional sentiments,” she quotes the Duke of Milan from More Dissemblers: For once to marry Is honourable in woman, and her ignorance Stands for a virtue, coming new and fresh; But second marriage shows desire in flesh Thence lust, and heat, and common custom grows . . . (2.1.76–80)

“Most Protestant thinkers and polemicists,” she adds, “. . . knew in principle that they should feel differently. Even while urging remarriage, however, they could not escape its age-old coding as a betrayal of the deceased” (403).9 When social historians discuss early modern English attitudes towards the remarriage of widows, they paint a similar picture. Again, there are a few voices of dissent, which describe a culture which tolerated and even encouraged remarriage for both sexes,10 but they are outnumbered by those who claim that widows were enjoined to celibacy and remarriage was condemned. Antonia Fraser, while admitting that remarriage was a very common occurrence, writes that there was “general agreement, except by a few generous-minded or realistic spirits, that a second marriage for women was to be avoided” (84); such marriages, she reports, were often seen as a form of bigamy or cuckoldry (82). Todd cites Vives’s The Instruction of a Christian Woman (trans. 1529), Erasmus’s De Vidua Christiana (1529),

Introduction

7

St. Paul, and a 1620 English manuscript treatise titled “The Widdowe Indeed” to prove that the seventeenth-century English widow faced both doctrinal opposition to remarriage and “a barrage of propaganda discouraging her from remarrying” (“Demographic,” 430). Other historians claim that “attitudes towards the remarriage of widows were increasingly negative during the early modern period” (Mendelson and Crawford, 69); that widows labored under the contradiction of being “expected to remain unmarried and respect the memory of their husbands” even though their lack of a male head “threatened the perceived social order” (Stretton, 10); and that societal disapproval of widow’s remarriage was strong enough to erupt in the ritualized hostility of charivari (Chaytor, 43; J. Thompson, 37). The most recent book on widows, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1999)11 deals with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England in chapters by Todd and Elizabeth Foyster: the former reiterates how “remarriage of widows was strongly discouraged,” (“Virtuous Widow,” 66–67), while the latter claims that remarriage, though common, was “subject to suspicion and disapproval” as shown by “a wealth of English literary material, ranging from advice books to ballads, plays, and medical tracts, which mocks and condemns widows and widowers who remarry” (“Experienced Widow,” 109). If we follow scholarly opinion about the remarrying widow somewhat further, we might conclude that Dr. Raven and his stage counterparts were not only urging widows to incur their society’s displeasure by remarrying, but that, in making straightforward appeals to the widows’ supposedly heightened sexual appetite, they were going about it in a peculiarly misguided way. The lusty widow stereotype, which Foyster considers to be some of the “harshest criticism” that male authors directed at widows (“Experienced Widow,” 110), and Todd describes as “negative” and “deleterious” (“Virtuous Widow,” 67), is widely interpreted by critics as an ideological weapon used to enforce a widow’s continued celibacy. Consensus holds that the power of this insulting stereotype, so aptly summarized by Middleton’s Duke, was that it coerced the widow, at the risk of her reputation, to eschew any kind of behavior – from independent business enterprise to remarriage for “love” to an attractive young man – that could be construed as evidence of unchastity or lustfulness. Faced with the threat of a woman who was legally, economically, and sexually independent, men constructed and deployed the notion of the sexually rapacious widow as a kind of ideological substitute for the official male control from which she had slipped free. Linda Woodbridge, while enumerating among the stereotype’s contributing factors “male wishful thinking” about widows as

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

“an easy sexual mark,” and “nagging worry on the part of husbands about what was to become of their wealth and their name if they predeceased their wives,” concludes that “the conjunction of charges of lust with widowhood’s inherent freedom of action combines with other literary evidence to suggest that the charge of lechery was a smear tactic against assertiveness and liberty” (178). Men feared that widows’ sexuality would “disrupt the social order” (Carlton, 127), and “the literary convention of the insatiate widow” was thus “a reflection of societal fear,” an attempt “to control her sexuality so that she produce[d] no more children to become competing heirs” (Geller, 288). A similar explanation for why widows were slandered with a reputation for “hypersexuality” suggests that “branding widows as social pariahs . . . served to contain that one group of women who could exist with a legal identity and without direct control of a man” (Jankowski, 36). In general, scholars agree that remarriage was equated with lust, and that accusations of lust were an effective tactic to scare widows away from remarriage, as Vives makes clear in his rebuke to widows wishing for a second husband: “confesse thine own vitiousness. For none of you taketh a husbande but to the intente that she will lie with him, nor except her lust pricke her” (sig. Dd6v). Remarriage, according to “Elizabethan moralists,” was “at best, a kind of legal adultery, at worst, an overt form of lust” (Brustein, 41), and “the widow’s ‘honour’ lay in remaining single” (Todd, “Demographic,” 430). Since, as many of the period’s comedies make clear, the wealthy widow was also a highly desirable commodity in the marriage market, she found herself caught in an unhappy paradox: while mercenary suitors exerted an intense pressure on her to remarry, only by abjuring remarriage could she be counted chaste and virtuous (Juneja, “Widow,” 5, 11–12). Remarriage for widows, then, according to the prevailing scholarly opinion, was generally disapproved of, except in some Protestant theological polemics; widowed chastity was upheld as the ideal, and widows were slandered as lustful in an effort to shame them out of fully realizing their legal independence and, above all, to prevent them from using their sexual independence to take a new husband of their choice. These views certainly present a plausible account of how a patriarchal society might work to contain women as they emerged out of wifely subordination and coverture. Plausible as they are, however, they make little sense of the behavior of Raven, Whythorne, and over two decades’ worth of widow-wooers on the comic stage. If the lusty widow stereotype was a terrible slander which any normal widow would seek to avoid, what would possess so many suitors to accost the widows they were courting with the kind of bawdy insinuations

Introduction

9

and crude appeals to their allegedly rapacious sexuality which they could only perceive as overt insults? Why would Chapman’s Tharsalio, courting the countess he used to serve as a page, brazenly counter her objection to marrying “one that waited on [her] board” by assuring her that his service “was only a preparation to [his] weight on [her] bed” (The Widow’s Tears, 1.2.72–73)? Why would the young prodigal Spendall in J. Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611) barge into the bedchamber of a rich and virtuous citizen widow to inform her that he “has both youth and livelihood upon him; / And can at midnight quicken and refresh / Pleasures decayed in [her]” (2538–40)? To reply that men wooed widows with sexual forwardness because they believed that widows were lusty only returns us to a central question: why did men believe widows were lusty? To reply that such wooing reveals “misogyny” (Juneja, “Widow,” 9–10), or men’s contempt for widows, is perhaps true but equally problematic: a suitor may well feel contempt for the woman he woos, but if he wishes to succeed, he does not usually display it as a prominent feature of his courtship. My starting point, then, is the discrepancy between the accepted formulation that male anxiety about a widow’s unrestrained sexuality led to the deployment of the stereotype of the lusty widow as a scare tactic to discourage remarriage, and the use to which this stereotype is put in so many comedies of the period. The notion of the widow’s inordinate sexual appetite, which dominated early modern discourse on a female “estate” through which a significant proportion of women would pass at one time in their lives, gave rise to stock theatrical characters and situations that have yet to be examined in their full cultural context. There is far more to discover about early modern English attitudes to female remarriage than can be gleaned from the usual suspects: Vives’s chapter on widows in The Instruction of a Christian Woman, the satirical portrait in Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters (1614), and Alexander Niccholes’s A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (1615). Going beyond these critical standbys reveals a rich variety of theatrical and non-theatrical texts which concern themselves with the remarrying widow, texts which do not leave her trapped in a paradox, but rather prove mutually illuminating in suggesting an alternate deployment for the prevalent trope of her sexual susceptibility. For while there are indeed certain figures, historical or fictional, who use what Woodbridge terms “charges of lust” as a threat to keep widows celibate – Vives obviously does so, as does Duke Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi; neither, we might note, is English – in most cases the lusty widow of early modern England appears to be less a manifestation of male anxiety (the fear that widows’ desire for sexual pleasure will drive them into second marriages or into disruptive non-marital sexual activity)

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

than a notion which functions (imperfectly) to assuage a rather different kind of male anxiety, centering around money, domestic government and the remarried widow as wife. In the pages that follow, I will make a case for how this alternate deployment of the stereotype of the lustful widow worked as an enabler rather than a preventer of remarriage, tracing its roots in masculine insecurities, its failure to fully or permanently compensate for those insecurities, and, above all, the integral part it plays in a fantasy which evidently appealed to at least a portion of the theatre patrons of early modern London. The early modern theatre was, in Douglas Bruster’s words, “a place where money [could] buy the fantasy of one’s choosing” (6), and the fantasy of obtaining wealth and status through marrying a widow of property was evidently a popular and lucrative one. Observing that “the lady richly left was a major male wishfulfillment fantasy in a culture where the pursuit of wealth through marriage was an avowed and reputable preoccupation” (69), Stephen Greenblatt gives an example of the extent to which the theatre normalized the widow as the center of this fantasy: in his early seventeenth-century summary of Twelfth Night (1600), John Manningham is struck by Malvolio’s attempt to rise in the world by marrying his mistress, observing that the play had “A good practise in it to make the Steward beleeve his Lady widdowe was in love with him” (176 n.4; Manningham, 18). Manningham’s mistaken assumption that the maiden heiress Olivia, in mourning for her brother, is in fact a remarrying widow shows a mind already moving along paths that would become even more well-trodden over the next two decades, while Shakespeare’s abbreviated, almost emblematic sketch in The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1592) of “a lusty widow . . . / That shall be wooed and wedded in a day” (4.2.50–51) suggests that such plots may have also had a history on the stage prior to 1600. The scenario of the steward, or some equally lowly young man, finding favor with the “Lady widdowe” may not be specific to comedy (Antonio and the Duchess of Malfi immediately come to mind), but it is only in comedy that we find remarriage uncomplicated by state concerns and dynastic maneuvering, more amenable to be read in terms of common English ideology rather than contemporary perceptions of foreign politics. My focus on comedy, then, not only redresses the imbalance in current criticism, and recognizes the fact that in the early modern theatre, remarriage is primarily a comic, not a tragic subject, but also seeks to investigate a facet of urban, middle-class English culture through the genre most frequently adapted to represent it. The arguments of this book are underlaid by the premises of its first chapter: that the remarriage of widows was not only a common fact of life

Introduction

11

in early modern England, but a socially, economically, and morally approved fact as well. The texts that have sometimes been taken as moral injunctions against remarriage – warnings to young men against marrying widows – are material for chapter 2, which examines how the widow’s desirability as a bride was counterbalanced by the threat she was assumed to pose to her new husband: paradoxically, the marriage that established his manhood (as a respectable, prosperous, married householder) simultaneously threatened to “emasculate” him through enforced subjection to his older, wealthier, maritally experienced wife. The figure of the ungovernable remarried widow and that of the lusty widow have typically been seen as two branches of the same dissuasive ideology, promulgated by a culture that disapproved of second marriages for women: according to this view, the latter worked to frighten widows away from remarriage with accusations of lust, while the former discouraged men from marrying widows. In chapter 3, which begins with an argument for Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears as a pro-remarriage comedy, I test the hypothesis that the lusty widow stereotype may in fact have been deployed to enable remarriage, by assuaging the anxiety aroused by the prospect of wooing and wedding a widow. The next chapter considers a third facet of contemporary discourse about widows: the remarried widow as jealous, sexually insatiable, and potentially unfaithful wife. While chapter 3 focuses on comedies which end with the suitor’s conquest – including Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1614), Barry’s Ram Alley (1608), Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611) Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), and a lost collaborative play titled Keep the Widow Waking (1624) – chapter 4 goes on to examine how the fantasy of the widow’s lust ultimately fails to compensate for his feared loss of authority: in texts such as Jack of Newbury (1597), by Thomas Deloney, or Middleton’s The Phoenix (1604), which follow the couple beyond the wedding, the desires which once laid the widow open to the suitor’s profit return to haunt the husband with the specter of cuckoldry. Middleton, the playwright whose comedies return most frequently and most inventively to the remarrying widow and her suitors, receives closer attention in chapter 5: through their thoroughly unconventional treatments of courtship and remarriage, three of his plays – A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1611), and The Widow – parodically expose the male fears and desires that construct the stock stage figure of the remarrying widow. It is reassuring to think that the web of connections this study will weave between life, text, and theatre would perhaps have been all too familiar to that experienced Elizabethan serving-man and widowwooer, Thomas Whythorne, who, years before Manningham recorded the

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

steward’s courtship in Twelfth Night, textually reconstructed his “remembrance” of his own “Lady widdowe” in distinctly theatrical terms: Wherefore came now to my remembrance again the original and first beginning of this our comical (I cannot say tragical) love; and how she but seemed to love me, because she would have me her slave to triumph over (though the conquest had been but simple); and I, seeming to be such a one as she would have me, more for the commodity that I looked to get at her hands, than for any great and over-hot love. So that neither of both our loves was for virtue’s sake, for the which indeed all love should be bestowed. (43)

Whythorne’s words could serve as the prologue to any number of the plays to be discussed here.

chapter 1

The widow’s choice: female remarriage in early modern England

For what body would not abhorre her, that after her first husbands death, sheweth her selfe to long after another, & casteth away her spouse Christ, and marrieth the devill first, & since man, beeing both widow, wife, and adulterer. Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman (trans. 1529), sig. Cc5r

I grant, were I a Spaniard to marry A widdow might disparage me, but being A true-borne Englishman, I cannot find How it can taint my Honour. Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), 5.1.51–54

If juxtaposing Vives’s opinion of a widow’s remarriage with that of Massinger’s Lord Lovell makes anything immediately apparent, it is the value of the local. The remarrying widow and her suitors in early modern English comedy can only be understood in terms of a cultural history that recognizes specificity of time and place: “early modern,” that increasingly elastic term, is here taken to span the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods, for the later seventeenth century saw changes in the theatre and in social practices, including a decline in female remarriage and a significant curtailing of widows’ inheritances, that alienate it beyond the scope of this study.1 “English,” obviously, means English, which requires that plays not set in England, not to mention didactic tracts by non-English authors, be scrutinized for evidence of represented or real cultural differences; “England” will also frequently be narrowed to “London,” the home of the theatres and most of the printing houses, the setting for numerous comedies, and a city with a distinct remarriage market of its own. This chapter, then, will take a local and specific approach to the controversial question of early modern English attitudes towards female remarriage. For the moment, I want to refrain from interpreting stereotypes of the widow and focus instead on less equivocal evidence of how 13

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

the culture regarded her choice to take a second husband – evidence which suggests that current critical notions of disapproval and dissuasion have been considerably overstated. Vivien Brodsky’s work on London widows and remarriage has put to rest an earlier assumption, based on rural remarriage statistics, that the London stage offered a kind of unsubstantiated slander in its depiction of widows who rapidly remarried with younger bachelors.2 In fact, most aspects of remarriage – the laws and customs governing widows’ inheritances, the percentage of second-time brides, the intervals between death and remarriage, the ages of the men widows married – varied significantly by locality, and as Brodsky points out, the evidence from early seventeenth-century London indicates that “the literary obsession with lecherous widows, rapid remarriage to young men, and the lure of large dowries . . . has at least some basis in historical reality” (126).3 The city was at this period the site of “an active remarriage market, particularly for the widows of city craftsmen and tradesmen,” who “appear to have remarried quickly and to have often married single men younger than themselves” (123). Investigating marriage by license in London between 1598 and 16194 – the period, incidentally, during which most of the extant comedies involving widows were staged – she finds that 35 percent of all brides were widows; furthermore, widows marrying bachelors comprised 19 percent of all marriages, compared to just 10 percent of marriages being between widowers and spinsters (128). Nearly 30 percent of all low-status craftsmen (such as blacksmiths, weavers, butchers, and carpenters) marrying by license and for the first time married widows, as did 22 percent of high-status tradesmen (grocers, haberdashers, goldsmiths, and drapers); both of these proportions are described as high (Elliott, 83). Of the remarrying widows of craftsmen and tradesmen, 60 percent married bachelors rather than widowers, and in 80 percent of these widow–bachelor marriages, the man was younger than his bride (Brodsky, 127).5 By contrast, of 142 weddings in the Devonshire village of Colyton around the same period, only two matched a widow with a younger bachelor, and “men were nine times more likely to marry younger single women than widows to wed unmarried youths” (Carlton, 122, 127). In London, the average age difference between an older widow and her younger new husband was about four and a half years, with the widows of low-status craftsmen generally showing a larger age gap (6.3 years) than their high status counterparts (2.2 years) (Brodsky, 127). This difference is perhaps explained by the fact that the wealthier tradesmen tended to take brides several years younger than themselves (Elliott, 84–86), and consequently may have left younger widows, who remarried with men of similar

The widow’s choice

15

status. The widow’s age was also a factor in her choice of second husband: while women aged forty-five to sixty-five tended to remarry with widowers, often older than themselves, widows under forty showed a preference for a younger bachelor. The marital choice of widows aged forty to forty-four was split equally between bachelors and widowers (Brodsky, 130). As for the speed of remarriage, 67 percent of all the widows in Brodsky’s group remarried within one year of their husbands’ deaths, and wealth certainly seems to have expedited the matter: “nearly 47 percent of all tradesmen’s widows had remarried within six months or less – a significant difference from widows of craftsmen, only 28 percent of whom had found a new partner in the same interval” (132). In most parts of England, male remarriage was both more common and more rapid, but London widows remarried as often and as quickly as their male counterparts (122, 134): while “the median interval to [female] remarriage in 14 provincial parishes was 19.4 months . . . for the widows of London craftsmen and tradesmen it was as low as nine months” (134). The theatre may exaggerate this behavior – Thomasine in Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1606) is remarried even before she settles the bill for her husband’s funeral, while Cicely Swaine, the speediest widow in Brodsky’s study, at least waited three weeks (132) – but given the difference between the behavior of city widows and their rural sisters, it seems that the comic remarrying-widow plots that proliferated in early seventeenth-century London may have had the appeal of local humor. While Brodsky acknowledges her study is biased towards middling to wealthier Londoners who could afford to marry by license (128–29), Jeremy Boulton’s evidence from the other end of the social spectrum reveals that remarriage was equally if not more common among poorer widows. In the poor East London parish of Stepney, widows made up 43 to 45 percent of all brides between 1615 and 1625 – an “extremely high” proportion (328). Stepney widows, too, showed a liking for younger men: about 46 percent of them married men younger than themselves, and more than one quarter took husbands five or more years their junior (336). Boulton has no data on the speed with which these widows remarried, but his evidence for the period before 1625 corroborates Brodsky’s to suggest that remarriage was then a common part of London life.6 While these remarriages were no doubt motivated on both sides by a wide variety of reasons, including love, the desire for companionship, and the need for a spouse’s help in raising children, there is evidence that economic incentives played a significant role. It is generally fair to say that it was in the economic interest of many London men to marry widows, and in the similar interest of many London widows to remarry. As Erickson explains, “all

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

studies of wills in early modern England agree that in general widows were the principal beneficiaries of their husbands’ wills, almost invariably receiving much more than their legal entitlement of one third” (Women and Property, 162). Most men named their wife as sole executrix (80 percent in Brodsky’s sample [145]), giving her “virtually complete control over her former husband’s estate . . . The most common bequest to the executrix was ‘all the rest of my goods moveable and unmoveable left unbequeathed,’ in addition to any specified bequests,” which residual goods usually comprised the bulk of the estate (Erickson, Women and Property, 161–62). A husband was able to limit his widow’s inheritance to her legally mandated third of his residual estate (or half, if there were no children) plus any goods she had brought into the marriage (if he had not disposed of them beforehand), and also to stipulate that she forfeit any bequest above that amount upon her remarriage. However, very few husbands actually did so. Brodsky found only thirty-five such “punitive” wills among a sample of 315; the vast majority of wealthier citizens left “large sums of capital, shops and leases to ‘dear’ and ‘well-beloved’ wives” without constraint, while their poorer neighbours’ wills expressed regret that even the bequest of their whole estate endowed their widows with so little (144–47). Widows of men who died intestate almost invariably received more than their legal “thirds”: before 1670, when the Act for the Better Settling of Intestates’ Estates restricted a widow’s inheritance, the median allotment to widows with children was 63 percent of the residual estate, while a significant minority of women (18 percent) received all of it; moreover, unlike certain husbands, the ecclesiastical courts never imposed restrictions on a widow’s inheritance in the case of her subsequent remarriage (Erickson, Women and Property, 178, 180). Under the law of coverture, all of a widow’s inherited property would accrue to her new husband: her moveables and leases became his to dispose of as he pleased, her freehold or copyhold land his to control and profit from during his lifetime (Erickson, Women and Property, 24–25). In London, the new husband who became joint guardian of his wife’s children also acquired the right to trade with or otherwise use the children’s patrimonies to his profit, repaying only the original sum when they came of age.7 For an apprentice or journeyman, marrying the widow of an established member of his craft or trade was also a step up to the status of master.8 In some cases, it could be a ticket into the company itself: the man who married a Printer’s widow did not even have to be a Printer himself to enjoy the right to continue her late husband’s business, for unlike the widows of other companymen, Printers’ widows retained their rights in the company even after remarriage (A. Clark, 161–62). Other men clearly

The widow’s choice

17

found it worth their while to leave their own crafts or trades to marry a widow of a different company: Steve Rappaport lists three such cases from the Merchant Taylors’ records of the late 1580s and early 1590s, including that of Thomas Wiggin, whose company permitted him to leave to marry a Vintner’s widow and even waived the usual fine exacted for this transfer because he was found “to be a young man and his estate to be but small” (41). Perhaps Wiggin could not afford the fine, but the Merchant Taylors may also have been understanding towards a poor young man’s desire for such a match.9 Although the widow of a crafts- or tradesman was technically entitled to keep her husband’s business, practicing his occupation with the continued assistance of his apprentices and loans from his company, it appears that not many actually did so (Brodsky, 140–43). Freed from coverture, a widow had all the necessary legal rights to support herself independently, including the rights to acquire and dispose of property, contract debts, take apprentices, or make a will, and she was the only woman “who in practice possessed the economic rights of companymen and thus could ply a craft or trade with some degree of institutional freedom” (Rappaport, 39). Some widows did exercise their right to pursue their late husband’s work, but as the research of Brodsky, Rappaport, and Mary Prior has shown, a network of formal and informal male control throughout the company system ensured that these women were exceptions to the rule. Prior states that in “the craft guilds widows were tacitly excluded from office, and in Oxford, which was probably typical, there is no evidence that they attended the regular meetings of the guilds and companies” (96). In London, Brodsky describes a similar pattern: “[t]he London companies provided an overarching structure for the thousands of male apprentices, journeymen and small masters, and were highly masculine in their identity and occupancy of positions of power – the masters, the wardens, the liverymen, the assistants and the yeomanry” (141). Moreover, a young woman was deprived of almost all opportunities for formal apprenticeship, and although when she married a companyman she might assist him in his craft or trade, the work that she performed in this context would generally be unskilled and auxiliary.10 As a result, a widow usually lacked both the skills and the organized support network to continue efficiently the business to which she was legally entitled, for she was without formal training in her husband’s craft or trade, and, as a woman, overtly or tacitly excluded from the company’s activities. Sue Wright, who discusses the many practical disadvantages hindering Salisbury widows from continuing their husbands’ businesses, cites a telling comment from an early seventeenth-century Clothier about a widow who

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

had lost money selling her inherited cloth: while he himself had suffered from the recent “great dampe of deadnes” in the cloth trade, she had fared far worse, “especially being a widow woman not knowing how to doe the best for herself ” (115). Similar worries may have been on the mind of the widow Treglyne, who in 1593 welcomed John Morcombe’s proposal of marriage after being introduced to him by a mutual friend who pointed out that “he is one of thy husbandes occupation and therefore is best meete for thee” (Houlbrooke, 212). Whether a widow remarried within her late husband’s company (as one third to one half of London widows tended to do), or outside of it, numerous “formal obstacles and informal pressures emanating from well-organized male structures served to make rapid remarriage an attractive alternative to the independent exercising of a craft or trade as a widow” (Brodsky, 142). When these London widows married, did they do so in contravention of their culture’s values? As described earlier, both social historians and literary critics have argued for a significant degree of societal prejudice against female remarriage. The most plausible and sophisticated analyses of this issue suggest that such prejudice was in large part due to the lingering influence of Catholic doctrine, which strongly favored continued celibacy for widows and denigrated remarriage as a last resort for those who were too weak and fleshly to “contain.” Although Protestant clergy were “devising a theology out of difference” (Kehler, 404), which included opposition to anything that savored of the Catholic veneration of celibacy, the Catholic attitudes towards remarriage which had held sway in pre-Reformation England were apparently not so easily rooted out of popular belief.11 The “Catholic” view of what constituted acceptable behavior for widows is expounded in manuals like Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman (trans. 1529), Leonardus Lessius’s The Treasure of Vowed Chastity (trans. 1621); Fulvius Androtius’s The Widdowe’s Glasse (trans. 1621), Erasmus’s De Vidua Christiana (1529) and Cesare Cabei’s Ornamenti della Gentildonna Vedova (1574), all of which expand upon the teachings of St. Paul as interpreted by the church fathers St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. John Chrysostom:12 in general, the virtuous widow is to live a sober, retired life devoted to piety and charity, and to achieve, through her strict chastity, a kind of renewed virginity that is more pleasing to God than matrimony. Remarriage is grudgingly permitted in terms clearly designed to encourage even the youngest widow to strive instead for the chaste ideal: Vives prefaces his paraphrase of Pauline doctrine – “I would that the yonger should marry & bring forth children, & rule their house & give their enemy none occasion to say ill by them” (sig. Dd8r) – with a harsh admonition:

The widow’s choice

19

Confesse thine owne vitiousnes. For none of you taketh a husbande but to the intente that she will lie with him, nor except her lust pricke her. What a ragiousnes is it, to set thy chastity common like an harlot, that thou maiest gather riches; And for a vile, and a thing that shall soone passe awaye, to file thy chastitie that is a thinge most pretious and everlastinge: if thou have children already, what needest thou marrie: If thou have none, why dost thou not feare the barrennes, that thou hast proved afore: and adventurest uppon an uncertaine thing, and forgoest thine honesty and chastitie, that thou wast sure of. (sigs. D6v–D7r)

Cabei, evidently hoping to catch more flies with honey, follows the same quotation of St. Paul with an assurance to young widows that “la giovenile et`a rende molto pi`u venerabile la pudicitia, e la continenza vedovile, & accresce il merito, che da tanta virt`u ne segue” (20) (“Youth makes modesty and widowed chastity far more admirable, and increases the merit that follows so much virtue”); he later adds that all of his advice on living a continent and austere life is especially addressed to the young widow, who needs it the most (40). The theory of “deeply rooted lingering prejudices” (Kehler, 399), however, relies on the assumption that “Catholicism” had created a set of values and customs in England that were essentially the same as those of continental Europe, especially Mediterranean Europe, the provenance of most of the extant Catholic manuals with instructions for a widow’s behavior. In fact, the distaste for remarriage evident in these manuals is far more consonant with the practices and customs – some having little to do with religion – of their countries of origin, than with what can be discerned of remarriage in pre-Reformation England; that some of them, notably Vives’s Instruction, were translated into English does not appear to have meant that they thereby dictated, or even unduly influenced ingrained local customs and the attitudes that accompanied them. There is, as I will show, little evidence that Catholic England held the same cultural biases against female remarriage as Spain, Italy, or France; proof that any such bias lingered on through the Elizabethan period and into the seventeenth century is even harder to find. One of the most compelling pieces of evidence about attitudes towards remarriage in pre-Reformation England comes from an unusually objective source. Writing around 1500, with no didactic axe to grind and no personal involvement in the practices he describes, an anonymous secretary to the Italian ambassador at the court of Henry viii inserted a note about the remarriage of widows between his opinion on the English habit of sending aristocratic youth out to service and a remark about the island’s natural resources. With considerable surprise, he notes that English upper-class

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

widows commonly remarry with the young men who board and serve in their households, and that No Englishman can complain of this corrupt practice, it being universal throughout the kingdom; nor does any one, arrived at years of discretion, find fault with his mother for marrying again during his childhood, because, from very ancient custom, this license has become so sanctioned, that it is not considered any discredit to a woman to marry again every time that she is left a widow, however unsuitable the match may be as to age, rank, and fortune. (Sneyd, 27)13

Rowena Archer points out that the Italian author of this Relation of the Island of England evidently failed to take into account the irritation felt by the heirs to baronies, earldoms, and dukedoms who found “unsavoury second husbands in control of their inheritances;” moreover, widows at the highest levels of society were expected to remarry by license from the crown, and could be fined heavily for making an unapproved match. Nonetheless, aristocratic widows continued to remarry in exactly the pattern the Relation describes, apparently undeterred by disgruntled relatives or royal fines (27),14 and it is clear from the Italian secretary’s scandalized tone that he is observing a system with a set of rules and values quite different from the ones of his homeland. At lower levels of society, too, the widow’s right to take a second husband seems to have been equally sanctioned by “ancient custom” and considered morally unexceptionable: Barbara Hanawalt’s study of medieval English widows finds that between a third to two-thirds of those widows who might be least expected to find new husbands – widows with disputed dowers, and those with minor children – were already remarried by the time they appeared before the authorities to defend their inheritances or register their orphans; the overall remarriage rate, she adds, would certainly have been higher (“Widow’s Mite,” 36). Although Joel T. Rosenthal observes a “hectoring” tone in the wills of some fifteenth-century men who stipulated that their wives “remain a chaste widow” (191), Hanawalt shows that few husbands actually made any testamentary objection to their wives’ remarriage, with only 3 percent of 1,743 pre-fifteenth-century wills from the London Hustings court restricting any bequest to the duration of widowhood (“Widow’s Mite,” 26). Wills of this nature, moreover, cannot be automatically assumed to display the testator’s desire to prevent his wife from remarrying. Working with a sample of 138 Norfolk landholders’ wills from between 1440 and 1580, Jane Whittle scrutinizes the thirteen wills which limit bequests in case of remarriage and concludes that “the argument that the restriction manifests male jealousy and concern for children’s

The widow’s choice

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inheritance cannot be upheld” (57): among other things, almost half of the “restrictive” testators give the lie to any such interpretation by providing the widow with land if she remained single, and cash – from the sale of the land – if she did not. A London Skinner in 1403 went so far as to impose an even more encouraging kind of “restriction,” bequeathing his wife his business and apprentices with the stipulation that she continue the trade or marry someone of the same occupation within three years (Hanawalt, “Widow’s Mite,” 26). The Medieval London widow of any property, like her early modern counterpart, was highly prized as a bride,15 and the extent to which remarriage was considered a moral or social disgrace may be gauged from how a fifteenth-century Mercers’ court responded to one young companyman’s engagement to a wealthy Vintner’s widow: as Sylvia L. Thrupp describes it, “the court felt that the whole company was honoured, ‘which is a worship to the felyshipp a yonge man owet of the lyvery to be preferred to such a riche marriage,’ and he was immediately promoted to the livery” (29). One reason why a widow’s right to choose a second husband was an approved “ancient custom” in Catholic England but not in other Catholic countries such as Italy probably had less to do with doctrine and piety than with local marriage and dowry customs. As Christine Klapisch-Zuber explains, the Italian dowry system created a situation in which the family of the widow’s late husband and, if she were very young, her family of birth, were motivated to strongly pressure her into celibacy or remarriage respectively. If she continued to live celibately in the house of her in-laws, then her late husband’s relatives and heirs – who were not necessarily her children – were assured the continued use of her dowry. Her blood kin, on the other hand, could benefit from asserting their own right to a young widow and the dowry they had given her, bestowing her and the money in another alliance advantageous to themselves (120–24). “Extraordinarily few” rich widows, young or old, managed to live independently; rather, contemporary reports “leave an impression of widows’ abject submission to the demands of their kin” (Klapisch-Zuber, 126).16 Noting that Italian prescriptive literature invariably urged the widow to live a life of not only celibacy but material austerity, Margaret L. King astutely surmises that “[t]he moralists’ recommendation could have had economic motives. The pious austerity of the widow signified the nonrecovery of a dowry: her wealth continued to fructify the lineage of her husband after his death, as during his life” (60). Italian laws regarding the custody of children must have also served as a powerful deterrent against female remarriage, for a widow “automatically and irrevocably lost the guardianship of her own

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children” upon taking another husband, leading family journals and popular literature to portray a mother’s remarriage as tantamount to child abandonment (Calvi, 278–80). Contrary to Italian practice, an English bride did not customarily move in with her husband’s family upon marriage, did keep custody of her children through any number of subsequent marriages, and usually found the amount of dowry or “portion” she had brought her husband returned to her independent use when he died, augmented by whatever she had inherited as her dower.17 In London, the generous dower assured by city custom, along with the widow’s freedom to take it into a subsequent marriage, created an urban culture in which patrilineal control of property was considerably weaker than it was in Italy: “instead of vertical structures of male family identity predominating, the horizontal ones of guild and craft became important” as widows remarried frequently, often within the same trade (Hanawalt, “Widow’s Mite,” 39). The pre-Reformation English widow also had the option of assuming “the mantle and the ring” in a lay vow of chastity, but here again, cultural practices and material considerations may well have held more sway than Catholic doctrine. According to Mary Erler’s work, such “vowesses” appear to have often been driven by economic motives and benefits. Vowesses tended to be busy, worldly women of the mercantile elite with much property to safeguard for their children, and the profession of chastity freed them from the pressure to remarry, allowing them the “continuance of an active life as an economic agent” (180). Two of the three widows whom Erler studies became vowesses in response to their husbands’ willing them extremely large amounts of property for the duration of their widowhood, and one of these women, thrice married before she took the vow, subsequently broke it for an even more profitable fourth match. When cultural customs are taken into account, then, it becomes difficult to use the prescriptive tracts of Mediterranean Europe to claim that early modern England was struggling to emerge from a monolithic “Catholic” attitude toward widowhood which closely resembled that depicted in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614) or Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (1615). Even if we allow the Italian author of the Relation some room for shocked exaggeration, it is evident that the remarriage of widows was never exactly a new-fangled Protestant notion preached to a resisting public. Returning to the early modern period, the pitfalls of extrapolating English custom from foreign evidence are strikingly illustrated by the claims of some social historians that the English remarrying widow faced public humiliation in the form of charivari, or rough music – a practice that would

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certainly indicate intense societal disapproval of her choice. In her study of Ryton households in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Miranda Chaytor writes that “remarriage was not only economically unnecessary, it was socially discouraged: ritualized hostility to second marriages (charivari, Katzenmusik, rough music) has been widely documented and convincingly explained” (43); Janet Thompson, focusing on seventeenthcentury Devon, similarly observes that “lower-class ostracism as expressed in the form of charivari could be extremely cruel to women who remarried. The woman and her new husband might be subjected to all sorts of mocking abuse or even violence, particularly if there was a disparity in their ages” (37). Both Chaytor and Thompson cite Natalie Zemon Davis as their primary evidence for these claims. But while charivari against remarrying widows has indeed been widely documented and convincingly explained in Davis’s work, her study is of late Medieval and sixteenth-century rural French villages, where “the most frequent occasion” for charivari “was in connection with second marriages,” when masked youth would create a clamor outside the couple’s home, mocking the “Vieille carcasse, folle d’amour” until they were pacified with money (105–07).18 In fact, remarriage in England has never been documented as an occasion for rough music or “ridings,” which Martin Ingram’s study shows to have been reserved primarily for suspected cuckolds, insubordinate wives and, occasionally, adulterers or unpopular public officials (86–92).19 In France – as in Italy, where rough music, known as mattinate, against remarrying widows was troublesome enough to prompt civil authorities to pass statutes against it (KlapischZuber, 262–63) – the popular scorn expressed by charivari went hand in hand with theological disapproval and a legal climate opposed to a widow’s independent disposal of her marital inheritance. The French church refused to bless marriages with a widow bride (it did bless remarrying widowers),20 and the 1560 Edict of Second Marriages, registered in the Parlement de Paris “with great applause,” prohibited widows with children or grandchildren from giving their new husbands gifts of moveable goods, or of any property greater than the smallest inheritance allocated to any one child (Warner, 84–87). Contemporary Londoners would have thought these restrictions foreign indeed. The gulf between sixteenth-century French views of remarriage and seventeenth-century English ones is further in evidence when we look at a pair of prescriptive texts: Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s The Commendation of Matrimony, translated into English by D. Clapham in 1540, and William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622). Both authors say that remarriage is morally permissible and not sinful; that in itself, however, tells us little.

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What is significant here is how the two men state this opinion. Agrippa castigates an other no lesse damnable custome, whiche hath taken place among many nations to speake commonly evyll of them that mary the second time. yea and moreover they co[n]demne them that mary agayne in a certayne somme of money, and the same they ley up for a knotte of good company, to make mery with, and they make Joseph the husbande of the moste blessed vyrgin Mary, the patrone of this so wicked sclander against goddes misterye . . . But this damnable fascio[n] must be taken away and plucked cleane out of the dominyons of Fraunce. (C5v–C6r)

Here, on the other hand, is Gouge: 1. que st . Are they who have buried their husband or wife so free as they may marie againe? an sw. Yea, as free as they who were never before married. [A selection of passages from the Old and New Testaments supports this assertion.] 2 . que st . May this libertie be extended any further then to a second mariage? answ . We finde no restraint from a third, or fourth, or more marriages, if by the divine providence so many wives, or husbands one after another be taken away while there is need for the surviving partie to use the benefit of mariage. (186–87)

The sixteenth-century French text is clearly challenging an established tradition of disparaging second marriages: people “speake evyll” of them; they have a specific, customary method of deriding them, namely the charivari, which ceases only with the couple paying over the “certayne somme of money”; this custom has a well-known name involving St. Joseph (perhaps on the blasphemous assumption that he took a wife who was “used goods”), and it is sufficiently widespread, and probably sufficiently raucous, to have raised the author’s ire, as shown by the heated tone of the final sentence. Gouge, however, who can be heated enough himself where he finds sins to condemn, treats the question of remarriage in a calm, rather perfunctory manner as part of his section on who is fit to marry whom. As his didactic method involves matching each ideal or duty with its “contrary” – the ideal inverted, or the duty neglected – his scripturally based approval of remarriage must necessarily be contrasted with others’ opinion that second marriages are a form of adultery. But while most of Gouge’s sinful “contraries” are drawn from everyday life for the better edification of his London parishioners, in the case of remarriage he apparently lacks material of this sort, and is obliged to fall back on censuring the opinion of ancient heretical sects, the Montanists and the “Cataphryges” (187). That Gouge,

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a Puritan minister, approves of remarriage is not especially surprising, but it is worth noting that he evidently assumes both his immediate audience and society at large share his sentiments. Given the discrepancy between English beliefs and practices regarding remarriage and those of Italy or France, it follows that literary depictions of widows should be approached with considerable care as to which culture is being represented. It is, of course, a critical commonplace that “foreign” dramatic settings routinely present local, English concerns in disguise.21 I believe it is wrong, however, to apply this assumption too sweepingly: while certain plays’ foreign settings are indeed no more than nominal – Middleton’s The Widow (1616), for instance, takes place in an “Istria” that boasts the Inns of Court (1.1.231), Christ’s Hospital (2.1.236), Michaelmas term (1.1.56), and London prisons (2.2.73) (Levine, 138 n.56) – others put a distinct effort into representing an exotic culture, complete with customs and values that an English audience could recognize as different from – and often inferior to – their own. For critics concerned with the remarrying widow, such recognition has taken some time: early scholarship on two “Italian” widow plays – The Duchess of Malfi and the “Milanese” More Dissemblers Besides Women – tends to assume that the powerful male characters who voice condemnatory attitudes towards remarriage speak for the playwrights and for English society at large;22 these views are corrected by Wadsworth and Geller, who point out that Protestant doctrine encouraged remarriage, and even Catholic moralists admitted, however grudgingly, that it was morally permissible. Furthermore, as Geller and Mikesell argue, the voices in these plays which oppose remarriage, equating it with sinful lust, are clearly branded as Catholic, associated with hypocrisy and corruption, and otherwise demonized by the Protestant playwrights. Since it is suggested, however, that these “Catholic” attitudes were still deeply rooted in the collective early modern psyche – according to Mikesell, The Duchess of Malfi “records the tenacity of social and religious values perceived to be bankrupt but stubbornly entrenched and threatening” (276), while Kehler claims that More Dissemblers’ Catholic Duke expresses “persistent conventional sentiments” (403) – I wish to take this progressive reconsideration a step further and suggest that the original audiences of The Duchess of Malfi and More Dissemblers would have recognized the strictures imposed on these stage widows as dictated by a kind of Catholicism inextricable from its Mediterranean heritage, more representative of a foreign culture than of a monolithic and tenacious theology. My focus will be primarily on More Dissemblers, not only because it has received far less

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attention than Webster’s play, but because the fate of its duchess, unlike that of her tragic counterpart, is not determined by genre.23 More Dissemblers is, as Kenneth Muir terms it, a “black comedy” (148), but it is a comedy nonetheless, and there is no generic reason why its young widowed duchess should not be included in the fifth-act marriages that claim the play’s two other heroines. In stage-Italy, however, it would appear that the widow who would remarry is as circumscribed by custom as she is by genre. Two factors in particular mark the widows of The Duchess of Malfi and More Dissemblers as “Italian”: male control, and physical confinement. As explained earlier, English practices granted widows far more autonomy than was customary in Italy, where family interests played a major role in determining a widow’s future. Accordingly, while fictional widows of all classes in English settings are almost universally independent – many are in charge of servants and other dependants, but with the exception of nineteen-year-old Dame Pliant in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), none have kinfolk or counselors who presume to make decisions for them – both of our Italian duchesses must contend with men who have considerable personal and economic stakes in whether and with whom they remarry. Neither woman, obviously, quite conforms to the picture Klapisch-Zuber paints of widows’ “abject submission to the demands of their kin” (126), but these demands themselves drive the plots of both plays. The Duchess of Malfi’s brothers entertain (or at least claim to entertain) both of the options open to an Italian widow’s kin – either keeping her a “continu’d widow” for their profit (4.2.283–87), or arranging a marital alliance to do themselves “honour” (1.1.294–97, 3.1.39–44). They also hire Bosola, as Mikesell observes, to “insure continuance of the familial oversight traditional for the woman” (271).24 The Duchess of Milan, prior to the start of More Dissemblers, has been pressured by her dying husband into a vow of chastity, and is thereafter held to it by continuing pressure from his friend the Cardinal. When the Duchess traps the Cardinal in a ruse to make him believe she has fallen in love with his favorite nephew, her counselor’s intense personal pride in having kept the widow celibate is quickly superseded by his eagerness for a glittering match within his own family, and he proceeds to try to convince her to remarry instead. In both plays – unlike in the English comedies to be examined later – men use the concept of the lusty widow as a threat to prevent remarriage: “They are most luxurious / Will wed twice,” warns Ferdinand, “. . . Their livers are more spotted than Laban’s sheep” (Duchess of Malfi, 1.1.297–99); in More Dissemblers, the Cardinal upholds the Duke’s instructions to his young wife:

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. . . once to marry Is honourable in woman, and her ignorance Stands for a virtue, coming new and fresh; But second marriage shows desire in flesh; Thence lust, and heat, and common custom grows; But she’s part virgin who but one man knows. (2.1.76–81)

To safeguard her chaste widowhood, the Duchess has spent the seven years since her husband’s death in strict seclusion, with the Cardinal as her only counselor: Sh’as kept her vow as strictly, and as chaste As everlasting life is kept for virtue, Even from the sight of men; to make her oath As uncorrupt as th’ honour of a virgin, That must be strict in thought, or else that title, Like one of frailty’s ruins, shrinks to dust: No longer she’s a virgin than she’s just. (1.2.21–27)

The payoff for the Cardinal is the enhancement of his own reputation – he has written “whole volumes . . . in zealous praise / of her eternal vow” (1.2.6–7) and boasts the Duchess as his “religious triumph” (1.2.64). The Duke’s views on remarriage, the Duchess’s seclusion, and her relationship with the Cardinal could all have come straight out of the pages of Vives:25 the Catholic author equates remarriage with “vitiousness,” “lust” and “set[ting] . . . chastity common like a harlot” (sig. Dd 6v); he also counsels the widow to a private, cloistered life lived under an elderly male thumb: If a Widowe would aske any counsaile, lette her chuse some aged man, that is past the lust of the worlde, nor is infected with vices nor is set upon covetousnes, nor will sette his mind on flattery for hope of advantage of lucre of money, & that is well learned, and by much experience hath gathered great wisdome, that he neither keepe her mind straiter tha[n] need is, not let hir have over much the bridle of liberty, nor doth count nothing more pretious, nor deare, tha[n] truth and vertue: . . . For in courts & resort of men, and gathering of people, a widow should not meddle. In the which places there is great jeoperdy of those things, that a widowe ought to set most by. (sig. Dd2v-Dd3r)26

Mikesell observes that the Duchess of Malfi’s brothers enforce her to a “corrupt parody” of the Catholic ideal of a widow’s withdrawn, contemplative life, imprisoning her with the admonition that she has been “too

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much in the light” and forcing “a kind of discipline on her that resembles Vives’s counsel that the widow occupy herself ‘in the contemplacion of those thinges that may mende her livynge and maners’ ” (272). But Vives is Spanish as well as Catholic, his tract commissioned by the similarly Spanish Catherine of Aragon, and it is as difficult in the Instruction of a Christian Woman as it is in the Italianate Duchess of Malfi and More Dissemblers to differentiate a “Catholic” viewpoint from the Mediterranean culture in which it is embedded. In fact, the Duchess of Milan’s confinement “[e]ven from the sight of men” plays into one of the commonest cultural stereotypes that the English held about both Italy and Spain: that the chastity of these countries’ gentlewomen was policed to the point of physical sequestration within the house. “It is the fashion of Italy,” remarks Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary of 1617, “that onely men and the masters of the family, goe into the market and buy victuals, for servants are never sent to that purpose, much lesse woemen, which, if they be chast, rather are locked up at home, as it were in prison” (148). While Moryson goes on to show more interest in the price of food in the market than the absence of women there, another contemporary traveler, Thomas Coryat (1611), explains the motivation behind this practice: the Venetians, he informs us, “graunt large dispensation and indulgence” to their city’s courtesans, for without them, . . . they thinke that the chastity of their wives would be the sooner assaulted, and so consequently they should be capricornified, (which of all the indignities in the world the Venetian cannot patiently endure) were it not for these places of evacuation. But I marvaile how that should be true though these Cortezans were utterly rooted out of the City. For the Gentlemen do even coope up their wives alwaies within the walles of their houses for feare of these inconveniences, as much as if there were no Cortezans at all in the City. So that you shall very seldome see a Venetian Gentleman’s wife but either at the solemnization of a great marriage, or at the Christning of a Jew, or late in the evening rowing in a Gondola. (vol. 1: 402–03)

Peter Heylyn, describing Italian customs somewhat later in his Cosmographie (1652), praises the “civill carriage and behaviour” of the men, but concurs that “Onely in strictness to their wives they exceed all reason, of whom they are so extremely jealous, that they shut them up all day from the common view, and permit them liberty of discourse with few or none” (53). Jealous husbands, as anyone familiar with early modern drama knows, are not exactly a foreign oddity, but this kind of extreme jealousy manifested in an urge towards confinement, is evidently considered a characteristic of the “Southern” temperament, common to Italians and Spaniards. In

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De Republica Anglorum (1583), Sir Thomas Smith observes that English wives “be not kept so streit as in mew and with a garde as they be in Italy and Spaine, but have almost as much libertie as in Fraunce” (104). And Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) explains how [i]n the most Northern Countries young men and maids familiarly dance together, men and their wives, which, Siena only excepted, Italians may not abide. The Greeks on the other side have their private baths for men and women, where they must not come near, not so much as see one another: and as Bodine observes, the Italians could never endure this, or a Spaniard, the very conceit of it would make him mad: and for that cause they lock up their women, and will not suffer them to be near men, so much as in the Church, but with a partition between. He telleth moreover, how that, when he was Embassador in England, he heard Mendoza the Spanish Legate finding fault with it as a filthy custom for men and women to sit promiscuously in Churches together. (827–28)

In More Dissemblers the Duchess’s seclusion stems from the dying Duke of Milan’s anticipation of being plagued by jealousy in heaven – a ludicrously exaggerated example of the “frenzie which much rageth in most Southern people” (Heylyn, 208): thou’rt so precious, I should depart in everlasting envy Unto the man that ever should enjoy thee: O, a new torment strikes his force into me When I but think on’t! I am rack’d and torn; Pity me in thy virtues. (2.1.64–69)

On the English stage, the association of male jealousy and the physical confinement of its female object is a mark of the Mediterranean: the Florentine Leantio locking up his newlywed wife in his mother’s house, worrying that “Should we show thieves our wealth, ’twould make ’em bolder” (Women Beware Women, 1.1.167); Othello, afraid that Iago might be right about the Venetians, growling that Desdemona needs “a sequester from liberty” (3.4.40). When the London citizen Harebrain decides to adopt similar tactics, he is well aware of their provenance: “There’s a gem I would not lose, kept by the Italian under lock and key; we Englishmen are careless creatures” (A Mad World My Masters, 1.2.20–22). Like The Duchess of Malfi, More Dissemblers invites sympathy for its confined Duchess and for her decision to remarry. It is clearer in Middleton’s play, moreover, that celibacy for this Milanese widow is a cultural ideal, not merely the bias of certain powerful individuals. The first lines of dialogue, in fact, are preceded by a sung paean to widowed chastity:

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy To be chaste is woman’s glory ’Tis her fame and honour’s story Here sits she in funeral weeds, Only bright in virtuous deeds; Come and read her life and praise, That singing weeps, and sighing plays. (1.1.1–6)

The singer is unseen, unidentifiable. Floating free of context, motive, or dramatic action, the song from “within” evokes the atmosphere of a society where virtue is cloistered and celibacy is glorified. As the scene opens, a character praises the “strange great widow, that has vow’d so stiffly / Ne’er to know love’s heat in a second husband,” scoffs at how “a month’s constancy / Is held a virtue in a city-widow,” and questions his betrothed about what she would do were he to die (she obediently responds that she would die too) (1.1.9–14). More Dissemblers’ emphasis on the cultural pervasiveness of such beliefs ensures that its Duchess evokes sympathy not only for her brief defiance of the Cardinal, but for the internal, emotional cost of that defiance. Less headstrong than the Duchess of Malfi, she has completely internalized her society’s derision of the widow’s sexual appetite and is as cowed by the prospect of such slander as its perpetrators could wish. While Geller clears the Duchess of the charge of moral degradation that earlier critics had brought against her for falling from chastity into desire, and notes that she has been well socialized to believe in the equation of remarriage with culpable lust (302–03), she accuses her nonetheless of being “competitive” and “prideful, much concerned with reputation, for her thoughts have little to do with her feelings for her dead husband or for God, and a great deal to do with what ‘male enemies’ would make of any wavering on her part” (301). But the Duchess’s speeches reveal that her pride has grown out of a pathetic anxiousness to avoid the contempt and moral condemnation that her society inflicts on the widow who would remarry: What a contented rest rewards my mind For faithfulness! I give it constancy, And it returns me peace. How happily Might woman live, methinks, confin’d within The knowledge of one husband! What comes of more rather proclaims desire Prince of affections than religious love, Brings frailty and our weakness into question ’Mongst our male enemies, makes widows’ tears

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Rather the cup of laughter than of pity: What credit can our sorrows have with men, When in some months’ space they turn light agen, Feast, dance, and go in colours? If my vow Were yet to make, I would not sleep without it . . . (1.3.1–14)

Although she does speak at a later point of the “glory” that her constancy earns her (1.3.55), and is certainly not without self-satisfaction in her virtue, her opening lines, quoted above, primarily give the impression of a woman who has conformed herself to the male-designed image of virtuous widowhood so that she can live in peace. Having internalized the beliefs of her “male enemies” (a telling choice of word, for the values she ascribes to them are the same as those held by the men – the late Duke and the Cardinal – who have insisted on her celibate seclusion), she eschews remarriage both to give her own conscience “rest” and “peace” and to escape men’s mockery and their pronouncements about female frailty. Her response to the Cardinal’s announcement that she must now undergo the “Temptations” (1.3.42) of mingling with men holds at least as much weariness as it does arrogance: Is there a doubt found yet? is it so hard For women to recover, with all diligence, And a true fasting faith from sensual pleasure What many of her sex has so long lost? Can you believe that any sight of man, Held he the worth of millions in one spirit Had power to alter me? (1.3.45–51)

The Duchess is proud of her ability to surpass male expectations of female virtue, but her speeches clearly reveal that she, as a woman and a widow, is at the mercy of men’s prescriptions for her behavior and men’s punishments if she deviates from them. As a result, the pride she takes in avoiding censure is far less reprehensible than the Cardinal’s pride in molding her for his own glorification. The Cardinal and men like him, not the Duchess, have made the rules. The play emphasizes, however, that perpetual chastity for a young widow – indeed, for anyone – is not virtuous but unnatural. Only her close confinement has kept the Duchess from the natural human experiences of love and desire; once she emerges from seclusion, she is smitten by Andrugio, the first man she sees. The Duchess’s awakening to desire is presented without moral condemnation or ridicule, with the experience

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of falling in love elevated and universalized by means of a masque. The masque is staged to welcome home Andrugio, the Duchess’s general, after his military victories. As the Duchess watches, a song of praise gives way to “a Cupid descending,” who sings of his own might as a “conqueror,” concluding, “it is not power in you, fair beauties; / If I command love, ’tis your duties” (1.3.86–87). During the masque, men and women are shown to be equally subject to love’s power: careless of his own victory celebration, Andrugio unhappily reads a letter from Aurelia, his absent and faithless beloved. “When he miss’d her whom his eye greedily sought for,” observes a sympathetic lord, “His welcome seem’d so poor, he took no joy in’t” (1.3.92–93). The Duchess, then, is not susceptible to love and desire because she is a widow, because she is a woman, or because she is frail or lacking in virtue. Such susceptibility, as she recognizes in the first flash of emotion, is merely part of being human: I confess I’m mortal; There’s no defending on’t; ’tis cruel flattery To make a lady believe otherwise. Is not this flesh? can you drive heat from fire? So may you love from this . . . (1.3.107–11)

The Duchess’s love is further dignified by the fact that Andrugio is undoubtedly the worthiest man in the play – loyal, courageous, and generous. And the highly artificial device of the masque ensures, paradoxically, that the Duchess’s desires appear wholly natural, inevitable to mortal men and women alike, and not merely the personal, reprehensible weakness of a lustful widow. Nevertheless, the Duchess cannot escape the guilt she has been trained to suffer for her desires. When her pursuit of Andrugio – to which she repeatedly refers as “an ill cause”(2.1.17), as “frailty,” or as “desires . . . sicken’d / Beyond recovery of good counsel” (2.1.91–98) – is thwarted by his love for Aurelia, she quickly assumes that her rival represents her welldeserved divine punishment: ’Twas a just cross led in by a temptation, For offering but to part from my dear vow, And I’ll embrace it cheerfully. (5.2.131–33)

Having seen through the Cardinal’s personal hypocrisy, but still constrained by her own internalization of her culture’s mores, the Duchess ends the play by entering a convent (5.2.200–04), imposing even stricter seclusion

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up herself than the Cardinal and the Duke had originally urged. That the Duchess’s career takes her from confinement, through a kind of brief freedom, to confinement again is in keeping with the dark tone that the play’s two fifth-act marriages lend to its conclusion: Andrugio marries the promiscuous Aurelia, perhaps without even being aware of the extent of her unfaithfulness; the long-suffering Page gets to marry the father of her child, but this is more of a desperate remedy than a choice, and the happiness of her future can be measured by Lactantio’s curses at being forced to “marry a quean” (5.2.257). In light of these two marriages, it is tempting to wonder if Middleton completes the unlucky threesome by showing the Duchess choosing to marry herself off to the most notable “harlot” of all, the Roman Catholic Church.27 Although genre determines that Middleton’s Duchess lives while Webster’s dies, the conventional English representation of Italian widowhood ensures that there are no truly happy endings for the woman who seeks to remarry. Reading Middleton’s play as a representation of Italian constraints on the widowed Duchess throws into sharp relief the prevailing early modern English views on female remarriage. To begin with, texts by Protestant ministers, whether Puritan or Anglican, invariably support it.28 For younger widows, according to such tracts, remarriage is more than a lawful option: it is almost an obligation. Quoting St. Paul (1 Timothy 5), and Naomi’s words to Ruth (Ruth 1.11), Edward Topsell (1596) speaks of “the duty of yonger widdows and women, which is to marry and to beare moe children” (43, my italics). “What is more seemly for a young widow,” agrees Thomas Becon in his Catechism (1559), “. . . than to marry in the fear of God, and to take unto her an husband, by whom she may have children and godly to bring them up, and to govern her household virtuously, and to do such other things as appertain unto an honest and godly wife?” (365). Richard Bernard (1628) even combines his approval of remarriage with an unexpectedly sympathetic view of widows who do so hastily: “wives cannot but mourn, except they conceit a new comfort very quickly, as some do, for fear the old grief should lie too long at the heart for him that is dead, and cannot be recalled. So with them, the living is better to be liked of then the dead, for they know their husbands would, perhaps, have so dealt with them” (8–9).29 While the remarriage of “old” widows, especially with men much their junior, is generally disparaged, it is useful to know that the designation of “young” applies considerably beyond those wives untimely bereaved in their teens or twenties: “there is a time when women are too old to

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marry . . . Now if any ask when that is, I answer, as I suppose, when a woman is about sixty years of age” (Bernard, 19). While the age of the Overburian “Vertuous Widdow” (usually attributed to John Webster) is not specified, the character’s praise of her chastity refers explicitly to celibacy in old age: “Shee lives to see her selfe full of time: being so necessary for earth, God calls her not to heaven, till she be very aged . . . this latter Chastity of Hers, is more grave and reverend, then that ere shee was married; for in it is neither hope, nor longing, nor feare, nor jealousie. Shee ought to bee a mirrour for our yongest Dames, to dresse themselves by when shee is fullest of wrinkles” (70). Texts which condemn the remarriage of old widows are correspondingly directed at the truly elderly woman: Alexander Niccholes (1615) derides “meere Croanes . . . lip-bearded, as wiches, with their warted antiquity and age [who] have angled into their beds with this bayted golden hook . . . youth whose chinnes have never yet fallen under the razor” (17), while a 1635 ballad, “The olde Bride, or the gilded Beauty” describes a gray-haired, toothless, disease-ridden old widow about to take her eighth husband. The ballad is, of course, exaggerated for comic effect, but when as serious a text as Becon’s Catechism turns to censure the remarriage of “old widows,” it too focuses on those who at “almost fourscore years old, have been known to marry with boys of eighteen years old,” and “another sort, being so plagued with diseases that they were not almost able to stir in their beds, [who] have not withstanding given themselves to marriage being far grown in age” (366). The robust widow of forty who wed her thirty year old journeyman would not have been likely to see herself in these portraits. Secular texts, and the few glimpses we have of individual lives, indicate that accepting, even encouraging attitudes toward a woman’s remarriage were commonly held, and were not merely Protestant doctrinal orthodoxies.30 Niccholes is decidedly unusual in his condemnation of widows – “I like them the worse that they will marry, dislike them utterly they marry so soon” (25) – but the context in which these lines appear goes some way toward explaining his aversion: Niccholes’s topic is not the morality of remarriage for women, but rather, “Advice for a choice, and whether it be best to marry a Widdow or a Maide” (24), and he dislikes widows (once again, old widows) as wives, “for shee that so soon forgets the flower and Bride-groome of her youth . . . will hardly thinke of a second in the neglect and decay of her age” (25). As warnings against marrying widows are widespread and significant enough to merit a detailed discussion of their own, admonitions like Niccholes’s will receive more attention in the

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next chapter. One might note at this point, however, that popular opinion seems to differ from Niccholes in the matter of a widow’s potential to love her second husband, for Thomas Whythorne (c. 1576) records that it is said that the love of a woman’s first husband goes to her heart, where it so warmeth the same that she hath a care not to change him. And if she chance to bury him and marry another husband, then the love that she beareth to her second husband, finding a way already made to her heart, pierceth through her heart and therewith inflameth the same in such sort that she hath the like care to change as she had before. (168)

Only with the third and subsequent husbands does the “hole through her heart” make the widow love less “hotly and constantly as she did before” (168). An attitude more representative than Niccholes’s is also found in a treatise of 1579 which describes itself as “A Pithie Epistle and learned discourse, of the worthiness of honourable Wedlocke, sent written (as a Juell) unto a worthie Gentlewoman, in the time of her widowhoode, to direct and guide her in the election of her seconde husbande.” The author, I.R., a kinsman of the gentlewoman, seems unaware of any societal disapproval connected to the issue on which he advises her. He spends most of the text discussing the qualities of a good husband, but as far as the choice itself to remarry goes, he casually remarks that “therein you may best be your own judge, for you know best where your shoe wringeth you: neither neede you any Counsaylour to bid you cut where it doth wringe you” (Pritchard, 52). If there were a popular bias against remarriage, it would likely be mentioned – if only to be opposed – in Angel Day’s 1599 model of “An Epistle Swasorie, wherein a Gentlewoman is counseled to marriage.” But Day’s hypothetical young widow, who is refusing an advantageous second match for fear of “the tatling humours of common supposes” is merely concerned that an overly hasty remarriage will be talked of: “you will have no suters, there must bee in your presence no speech at all of lyking, and you mean not so soone forsooth to set forward for a husband” (64). But seeing that the ideal suitor has surfaced, the author sees only harm in tarrying: Behooveth the respect of a little time, which (beeing sooner or later, so it bee perfourmed with modestie and aunswered with discretion) mattereth not at all to detaine you so much, as thereby you are not able to see into your owne profite? Is it not, I pray you, a purpose honest that is tendered? Is it not a matter lawfull to bee accepted? (64)

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Beneath the bewilderingly elaborate syntax, the questions are clearly rhetorical. While the “hastie conclusion” (65) of a second match might be gossiped about, neither the author, nor the recipient, nor, apparently, the tattling masses have anything to say against remarriage itself. We may also surmise something about popular attitudes to remarriage from the revisions Richard Brathwait made when he adapted parts of Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman into his own The English Gentlewoman (1631). Brathwait’s extensive borrowing from Vives makes him perhaps the strictest English dictator of a woman’s conduct during her widowhood, but, whether out of personal sentiment, fear for his book’s success, or both, he omits almost all of the Spanish, Catholic author’s overt condemnations of remarriage. For instance, while counseling a widow to eschew “goodly arayment,” Vives threatens that everyone will “abhorre her, that after her first husbands death, sheweth her selfe to long after another, & casteth away her spouse Christ, and marrieth the devill first, & since man, beeing both widow, wife, and adulterer” (sig. Cc5r). Brathwait, in the same context, notes that widows who “tricke and trimme” themselves are seeking husbands, and adds that “it were much more commendable” for widows neither to seek nor to accept new husbands, “lest enforced by necessity, or wonne by importunacy, or giving way to their frailty, they make exchange of their happy estate for a continuate scene of misery” (111). This is Brathwait’s only explicit dissuasion to the widow who would remarry: society’s “abhorrence” and a marriage to the devil are replaced by concern for the risk of a bad match. The handful of individuals who left written traces of their personal involvement with remarriage reveal a similar acceptance, and no hint that they lived in a society where such a step would be regarded with suspicion. In her “Memorandum” (1632), a poem which provides an unusual glimpse into a seventeenth-century woman’s thoughts on her own widowhood, the middle-class London widow Martha Moulsworth lovingly remembers her three husbands (two goldsmiths and a draper) without any sense that she transgressed her culture’s values in marrying them; rather, she seems to take pride in the religious significance of their number: Thrice this Right hand did holly wedlocke plight And thrice this Left with pledged ringe was dight three husbands me, & I have them enjoyed Nor I by them, nor they by me annoyde all lovely, lovinge all, some more, some lesse though gonn their love, & memorie I blesse. (Evans and Little, 206)31

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Moulsworth, who images her three marriages as a unified “threefold cord,” ends her poem with a cautionary note to herself against marrying yet again: Butt in the Meane tyme this must be my care Of knittinge here a fourth knott to beware A threefold cord though hardlie yett is broken Another auncient storie doth betoken32 Thatt seldome comes A Better; whie should I Then putt my Widowehood in Jeopardy? The Virgins life is gold, as Clarks us tell The Widowes silvar, I love silvar well. (208)

Moulsworth here invokes the old clerical valuations of virginity and celibate widowhood only as a playful means of self-justification; her real reason for being wary of remarriage, as her poem makes clear, is that she was especially happy with her third husband, a man with whom she had “[her] will in house, in purse in Store,” and doubted she could improve upon him (207). An Elizabethan widow named Anne Lloyd was a good deal less happy with her third husband, Humphrey, whom she sued in the Court of Requests for inadequate maintenance; she was, however, as proud as Moulsworth of her multiple marriages, establishing her social credentials in court by explaining how she was not only from a respected family, but had been twice before wed to gentlemen “of speciall creditt, [worth], and estymacion in their countrey” (Stretton, 192). A different perspective is provided by the brother of a widow whom Whythorne pursued: quite unlike his stage counterparts in The Duchess of Malfi, he cheerfully encouraged the music teacher in his suit, inviting him to sit down to a breakfast of “a piece of Brawn and a Christmas pie” and persuading his sister to get out of bed to share it with them – whereupon he discreetly “slunk away” to let the wooer get down to business (157). One might think that the least likely person to accept the prospect of a woman’s remarriage would be her dying husband: it has been suggested that “[a] husband feared that his widow would remarry and prefer another in her affections, that she would waste his painfully gotten estate, and that another man would deplete his children’s inheritance” (Mendelson and Crawford, 68). Discussing Sir Walter Raleigh’s views of remarriage, Kehler finds “an aporia between [his] two statements on this point” which “exemplifies an ineradicable ambivalence within the culture”: in 1603, when he was expecting to be executed, he advised his wife to remarry, “for that will be the best for you, both in respect of God and the world,” but later, “he was to cringe at the prospect of a Raleigh widow’s wedded bliss and

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counselled his son, as one testator to another, ‘if she [the son’s wife] love again, let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee’ ” (403–04). Taken in context, however, the latter remark reveals less sexual jealousy than a prudent desire to protect one’s estate for posterity: “let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee nor fly to future pleasures with those feathers which death hath pulled from thy wings; but leave thy estate to thy house and children in which thou livest upon earth while it lasteth” (Raleigh, 22). And in the letter where he advises his wife to remarry, he also informs her that “my lands were conveyed to my child bona fide” (Hammond, 276). The contradiction is thus rather less than it may appear. Some writers evidently did think that the best way to protect the interests of children from a first marriage was for a widow to remain single: as Geller points out, this premise forms the opening rationale for Overbury’s “Vertuous Widdow”: “A vertuous Widdow is the palme-tree, that thrives not after the supplanting of her husband. For her childrens sake she first marries, for she married that she might have children, and for their sakes she marries no more” (Geller, 290; Overbury, 70).33 Dying with a considerable estate in 1616, Sir Henry Fanshawe left ten children and a widow of whom he expressed confidence that she would not remarry for precisely that reason (Houlbrooke, 211; Fanshawe, 11, 286). Nor, probably, is it any coincidence that the only extant contemporary English work devoted to counseling widowed chastity, William Page’s manuscript treatise “The Widdowe Indeed” (c.1620), was written by a son for his mother.34 However, not all moralists agree with the Overburian concept of a virtuous widow: Richard Capel (1636) castigates those men who insist it is more “convenient” that their widows remain single “to bring up their children,” claiming that “the sons will stand in more awe of their father-in-law, than of a Woman their mother; and we doe see, that men doe use to take as great care for their wives former children, as tho they were their owne: and when two have a joynt care, it is better than one onely; and a womans care and power is never the lesse when shee hath one in commission with her to helpe her” (380–81). And as another author points out, the prudent man legally safeguards his children’s inheritance in his will without needing to dissuade their mother from remarriage. The Office of Christian Parents (1616) advises Raleigh’s choice, urging “Christian Fathers, in time of their health and memorie, to set downe such order, as the sweete savour of peace and love may remaine behind him, between his wife and children” (127), and realistically sees the wise mother not as one who vows never to remarry but as a woman who

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seeing the fashion of the world, and perhaps suspecting her own weaknesse, desireth her husband to divide his goods by will, and to allot every child his portion; not so much that she should not be troubled with it, as because shee knowes not how she may be intercepted, to doe her children wrong; as also if shee doe take caution for her children without the fathers will, it may hinder her peace with the second husband. (129)35

Even men who died intestate, though, could rest assured that many widows cared less about risking their “peace with the second husband” than they did about their children’s welfare, and insisted on arming themselves with a settlement for their children’s inheritances before entering a second marriage (Erickson, Women and Property, 132); conveyancing manuals like William West’s Symbolaeography (1592) provided widows with model “covenants of marriage” for arranging this kind of legal protection. Fathers in early modern London and Bristol, cities with long-established courts for the protection of orphans, had the additional comfort of knowing that the aldermen assumed responsibility for ensuring all children received their bequeathed portions or customary shares of the estate, guarding the inheritances with a system of sureties and legal repercussions against any depredations by unscrupulous stepfathers (Barron, xxv; E. Clark, 176–81). Men who, for a variety of personal reasons, simply wanted to restrict their wives’ ability to remarry could do so though testamentary penalties and incentives, as did the thirty-five “punitive” testators in Brodsky’s study, most of whom transferred to their children what they deducted from the widow upon her remarriage (144–45). These husbands, however, can be balanced against those who actually advised their wives to replace them after their deaths: not only Raleigh, but John Penry, who fearing execution in 1593 advised his wife “not to be a widow long after my daies” for “it is a great blessing for a woman to have a head”; Thomas Haukes, a Protestant put to death by Mary i, who wrote to his wife to find a God-fearing man to love and care for her; and William Hunt, who in 1633 consoled his wife from his deathbed by willing her all that he had and telling her that “she might doe well enoughe” if she was “carefull of her selfe [and] with whome she maryed after his death, that he might not spend that which he the said Hunt had gotten” (Houlbrooke, 213). While a few tolerant individuals are hardly proof of how most men viewed the prospect of their wives’ remarriage, the availability of legal options to protect one’s children and even, if so desired, to control one’s widow, suggests that there was simply little need for men to mount an ideological campaign against remarriage – such as the dissuasive deployment of the lusty widow stereotype – out of fear for their families.

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The persuasive deployment of the lusty widow stereotype and its theatrical manifestations will be the subject of the following chapters. At this point, however, two plays can round out the evidence adduced above for the early modern English approval of female remarriage. First, Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625) contains a speech which so clearly delineates the difference between English and Mediterranean attitudes that it is puzzling why it is not routinely chosen over The Duchess of Malfi as the preferred literary evidence on the subject. When the widowed Lady Alworth meets Lord Lovell’s marriage proposal with the modest reply that she would have been unworthy of him even “in [her] prime, / [Her] virginflower uncropp’d,” the impeccable English peer responds: I grant, were I a Spaniard to marry A widdow might disparage me, but being A true-borne Englishman, I cannot find How it can taint my Honour; nay what’s more, That which you thinke a blemish is to me The fairest lustre. You alreadie Madam Have given sure proofes how dearely you can cherish A Husband that deserves you; which confirmes me, That if I am not wanting in my care To doe you service, you’le be still the same That you were to your Alworth; (5.1.51–61)

A New Way, in fact, takes for granted that its virtuous widow is entitled to a second husband, should she desire one. Lord Lovell does try some polite discouragement when it appears she is planning to marry the disreputable Welborne – or more precisely, when the favors she bestows on him give rise to gossip – but he accepts her assurance that her intentions are merely charitable, and eventually marries her himself. William Rowley’s A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed (1615?)36 goes even further, upholding not only the widow’s decision to remarry, but her choice of a dissolute young spendthrift as her new husband. A New Wonder, as Alexander Leggatt describes it, is a moral citizen comedy praising the virtue of charity and exemplifying the properly charitable uses of wealth (Citizen Comedy, 16–17). Blessed all her life with almost perfect happiness and prosperity, the Widow (she is given no other name) wants to experience affliction for the health of her soul. She is assured by the uncharitable Mistris Foster that remarriage will do the trick – “Your second choyse will differ from the first: / So oft as widdowes marry they are accurst” (1.2.231–32) – and so when Mistris Foster introduces her to her prodigal brother-in-law

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Stephen at a gaming house, the Widow makes him a proposal: “I say, seeke me out some rich widow; promise her faire; shee’s apt to believe a young man; Marry her, and let her estate fly; no matter, ’tis charity; Twenty to one some rich Miser rak’d it together; this is none of Hercules labours” (2.1.231–35). The Widow’s “selfish” motive for marrying Stephen is treated lightly and humorously, but the effects of her choice and of her generosity are serious enough. Marriage to the Widow miraculously reforms the prodigal. Charity begets charity and the reformed Stephen not only carefully tends and increases his wife’s estate but adopts the nephew disowned by his selfish brother Old Foster, repairs Old Foster’s fortunes upon his repentance, and rises to become a Sheriff of London and a great public benefactor. The Widow is personally rewarded for her generosity when Stephen proves to be the perfect husband: loving, provident, and deferential, he always asks for her consent to all his charitable uses of her money, and, recognizing her virtue, encourages her to do “ought that may seeme good / To [her] own will” (3.2.98–99). Of course, the good fortune which rewards the Widow’s charity is humorously exaggerated. Stephen’s reform is no more “realistic” than is the return of her lost wedding ring in the belly of the salmon her cook buys for dinner. But the pathos and gravity of the Foster family saga in which she becomes involved, along with the overtly moralistic tone of the play, ensure that the Widow (whose namelessness suggests her potential in every widow) becomes an ideal, not merely a comic extreme.37 The Widow is not simply blessed with singular, inexplicable good fortune. Rather, she is singularly charitable, and her good fortune is shown to be a proportionate, providential reward. Rowley’s play, set in everyday London, presents a widow’s remarriage, and even her seemingly misguided choice of husband, as something wholly moral and admirable. (By contrasting the Widow’s happy match with Mistris Foster’s miserable one, in which her crabbed miserliness nearly destroys her husband, the play evades any prudent objections against such a choice by placing the responsibility for a marriage’s success almost entirely on the wife.) While only a “New Wonder” of a woman might be able to reform a wastrel like Stephen, the play implies that any widow’s marital generosity will reap rewards. The celebratory tale of Stephen and the Widow takes us back to where this chapter began: the economic reasons that made well-off London widows such highly desirable brides. I want to conclude, then, with one last text which suggests that we are not dealing with a culture where the statistics tell one story and the fictions another, where mercenary men seek

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after widows but society condemns the second-time bride. The Passionate Morrice, written in 1593 by someone identified only as “A.,” is best described as a secular didactic tract, meant to be both morally improving and entertaining, on how to conduct oneself during courtship. The tract begins with a series of vignettes – a bachelor wooing a maid, a widower wooing a maid, a bachelor wooing a widow, and so forth – interspersed with the evaluative commentary of the narrative persona, “Honestie.” From the first two vignettes, it is easy to gather what Honestie particularly opposes in courtship: excessive recourse to the opinions of parents and “friends,” and anything that savors of the mercenary. Of the first couple, Honestie derides the besotted young man as a “kind Asse” (55), but the real criticism is reserved for the girl who leads him on, accepts his “presents to gaine [her] good will” (53), and then refuses him on the pretext that he has not obtained her parents’ approval. “But marke his folly and her cunning,” instructs the narrator, “he, building Castles in the aire, and setting trappes in the Sunne to catch the shadowe of a coye queane, was pleased by her, with wagging his bawble and ringing his bell, while she pickt his pocket and cut his pursse” (54). The widower of the next couple is similarly castigated for being overly preoccupied with parents and property: having first obtained the consent of a young maiden’s father, he presents the match to her as her “duetie” (58) and is most disconcerted when she rejects him. Honestie, however, commends the woman’s good sense, for the widower “would have daunst with her portion, while she had drooped through want of affection; he would have loathed her company, for that she was not a dayly commoditie.” “It is most likely,” he adds, “he loved her not, & how well any body use them they love not, let them speake that suspect not” (59). The vignette is followed by a lengthy fulmination against such “money-woers”: Alas! good hearts, that are coupled with such bad mindes, this is love; true; but what love? covetous love, hatefull dissimulation, hipocriticall affection, and what not that is contrarie to the sweete soveraigne love, which sues for kisses and not for coyne, which craves the heart & nothing else; for with it, al she hath is his; and he that wil looke for more, I would he had a halter; and he shall not want it in hell, howsoever he speedes here. (61)

When it comes to widows, however, this forthright dislike of “covetous love” undergoes an odd permutation. One brief anecdote, told in passing, condemns a man who jilts a maid to wed a rich widow, but the third major vignette, which details a bachelor–widow courtship, has trouble sustaining this kind of single-mindedness. Here, it is the widow who falls afoul of Honestie for having the temerity to inquire into her suitor’s estate:

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She had heard her husband instruct his prentices to make a profit, and she thought she might trie the same for her own good. I would shee and others knewe what was good for them; they would then rather respect the man than money . . . [F]ollowed she not the greedie desire of adding muck to muck, might shee not as well have lived with this man, that had a trade as good, yea, much better then her husbands was, as she did before with him? Shee had no children; suppose she had, they were provided for well; and what greater charge woulde this have brought? (63)

The widow’s “greediness” is subsequently exacerbated by her discourtesy in refusing to meet with her suitor and deliver a formal answer, giving the narrator an opportunity to lecture widows on their obligation to be accessible to all wooers “during the time of the heate of the market”: “That everyone may be answered, is Honestie’s meaning; for unles they bee, they have not their due, nor do you shewe your selves to be inriched with that curtesie which widdowes discretion dooth challenge” (66). This much may perhaps be expected. But when it comes to the widow’s suitor, we find that he has Honestie’s entire support despite his obviously mercenary intent. Unexpectedly, the narrator provides a justification of this bachelor’s desire to marry a widow of property, and furnishes some advice to widows that runs bizarrely contrary to his earlier maxims. Although the suitor does reassure the anxious widow about his motives – “I respect not so much your wealth, as I doo your matronlike modestie; my selfe is young, and I have a trade, and am, I thanke God, of my selfe able to maintaine a woman” (63) – the narrator does not so much try to obscure the suitor’s interest in her wealth as to transform it into a virtue, advising widows that this young man . . . had a care to live, or else hee would have sought to love without respect; for who knowes not that she is as able to satisfie a mans desire that hath little, as she that hath much, if we onely regard pleasure? Take this on Honesties credit, that hee that buildes his love on such reason, as having little, hee will chose one that hath somewhat, wil prove a better match unto thee, then him that brings mountaines. Beware when love is upholden with maintenance; if the heart remembers, “I am thus much beholden unto her, shee loved mee or else shee would never have matcht with me; she made me a man, being before worse than nothing; how much better might she have done, if she had not been led with affection,” and such like; It will also remember the duetie this kindenes requireth, even like for like, least the worse crie shame of him. (64)

Whereas the maid who is married for her portion will be unloved and illtreated, a widow should actually welcome the man who chooses her because she “hath somewhat.”

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While the reader is still blinking at this sleight of hand, the text pushes the point even further, with a tale of a match “credibly reported . . . here in England”: a disreputable younger brother, “well knowne throughout the countrie for a shifting liver,” forcibly abducts a rich widow after she refuses his proposal of marriage. He and his companions storm into her house with drawn swords, tie up her servants and two visiting suitors, steal her saddles and let loose her horses to prevent pursuit, and carry the widow “bound . . . with a towel” to a waiting parson. A combination of “kinde words” and clever manipulation finally pressures her into consenting to the match – with the hue and cry on their heels, she is told her consent is the only way to spare her abductor’s life – and she even agrees to claim she orchestrated the whole affair. The moral of this story? The abductor proves a model husband, kind to his wife and generous to her son, leaving the narrator to declare, “Wherefore, then, should younger brothers be rejected, or why they that have little, be unregarded? Surely, because the hart is covetous and mistrustfull, and womens mindes are aspiring, being never contented” (67–69). The overall tone of The Passionate Morrice, I should point out, is one of homely, balanced common sense: maids should be wary of young men’s flattery, but the man is far more to blame than the maid if he seduces her with false promises of marriage (92–96); parental consent is good, but we are no longer living in biblical times where children can wait for their parents to provide them with mates (100); men should appreciate high-spirited young girls, and not insist on “monsters of modestie, desiring to have the maidens you would matche with, as very matrones as your mothers” (83). The author is given to neither high-minded religious moralizing nor misogynist invective. In the midst of such reasonableness, the wild flights of fancy about rich widows are all the more striking, as if the text is itself caught up in the fantasy of a wealthy widow match. The centrality of the widow to fantasies of marital advancement is unsurprising, for unlike the maiden heiress, she was generally free to bestow herself and her property on whom she pleased. Whythorne’s records of the times he courted young single women stand in sharp contrast to his amatory dealings with widows: while his relationships with the latter hinged solely on obtaining the women’s independent goodwill, he repeatedly found his intentions toward young maidens obstructed by the interests of their families. On one occasion, he found himself reluctantly refused by a young music student on the grounds that her parents controlled her “possibility of living” (64) and the parents subsequently employed subtle tactics to cool their daughter’s affection for Whythorne, preparing her for their own

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choice of a wealthy heir (68); on another, his inquiry as to his prospects with a “young maiden” in a house where he was employed was met with the mistress’s warning that the girl was “[her] husband’s kinswoman, and therefore he will bestow her where he liketh” (95). In the city, moreover, young, never-married women fell largely into two categories: relatively poor, single, migrant women who came to the city for employment and who married free from parental authority, and the daughters of well-to-do Londoners, whose parents ensured that their portions were destined for an economically desirable choice (Elliott, 84–86). Neither, obviously, was a good option for a young man with only his person to recommend him, who wished to establish himself through marriage. A ballad titled “A Proverb old, Yet ne’er Forgot, Tis Good to Strike While the Iron’s Hot” (c.1625) makes it clear where such men should set their sights: And besides thers many Lasses, dares not marry when they list, Cause her Portion ere she passes must come from her Fathers fist: but still you see a Widowes free, For friend or foe she careth not, then who would misse such time as this Tis good to strike while the Irons hott. (Rollins, Garland, 232)

With ballads like this to encourage the suitor, and texts as dissimilar as Becon’s Catechism and The Passionate Morrice joining to exhort the widow to fulfill her duty in receiving him, the problem that the widow poses to early modern ideology does not lie in the morality of remarriage itself. Whatever challenge her independence and power as an “unheaded” single woman may have presented to the patriarchal order, it was far outweighed, as the next chapter will explore, by the anxiety provoked by the remarried widow as wife.

chap t e r 2

The widow’s threat: domestic government and male anxiety

Let him marry a maide, to the end hee may teach her good maners, and such other dueties, as are most beseeming and decent for a wife, for shee wil also be more tractable than a widdow, who will rather looke to be obeied, as wel for that shee hath been before acquainted with love matters, as also because for the most part they bring greater wealth unto their husbands, then the maides doe . . . For whoso matcheth with farre richer wives then themselves, they seldom acknowledge them for their husbands, but rather account them as bondmen of their dowrie. Bartholomew Batty, The Christian Man’s Closet (1581), 97–98

But yet if I my choice should have A mayde should be my wife, I would not be a widdowe’s slave, I’d rather lose my life: If I should wed a Widow old, I had better take a younger, For Widowes will not be contrould, Yet I can stay no longer. “A Batchelor’s Resolution” (1629) (Rollins, Pepys Ballads, vol. 2, 113)

In 1594, Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland, married Lady Dorothy Perrot, the sister of the earl of Essex. The bride and groom were both around thirty years old; it was his first marriage and her second, she having lost her husband of eleven years, Sir Thomas Perrot, earlier that same year. The match, as Paul E. J. Hammer informs us, “was far from happy” (281), a state of affairs which seems to have not only been due to progressively cooling relations between Percy and his influential brother-in-law. Writing his Advice to his Son some fifteen years later, Percy records that he chose the rich Widow Perrot according to three criteria: he wanted a wife who was physically attractive, who had friends in high places, and who “should bring with her meat in her mouth to maintain her expense” (94). Dorothy, 46

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however – whose strength of will Percy might have surmised from her sensational elopement with her first husband Perrot at the age of eighteen (Lacey, 23) – evidently entered her second marriage with the intent to maintain a certain level of power in the relationship. The newlywed couple moved into a house which the widow had acquired on her husband’s death (Batho, 95–96), where Percy discovered that his wife would continue to be mistress of her own. Even though he had married Dorothy “within short time of her husband’s decease,” he found out to his dismay after the wedding that she had had certain profitable leases of hers “made over to her daughter . . . so as it was used as a curb to me afterwards, not yielding to that allowance she required” (Percy, 94–95). “He that takes her thus halfe-worne,” warns Niccholes of widows in A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (1615), “makes account she hath that will pay for new dressing, shee seemes to promise security in her peace, yet invites many times to a troublesome estate, when the conquest atchieved scarce countervailes the warres” (24). Taken in the context of Percy’s experience, Niccholes’s description of the widow-as-wife – part of his advice on “whether it be best to marry a Widdow or a Maide” – comes to sound less like simple propaganda against female remarriage, and more like the expression of an anxiety based in realistic concerns about money, domestic order, and practical, everyday power relations between husband and wife. While the figure of the ungovernable remarried widow is neither new nor specific to early modern England – the quotation from Batty which opens this chapter is based, he claims, on Aristotle, and a similar notion is common in the vernacular literature of early modern France (Warner, 90–91) – it nonetheless resonates to a considerable extent with records of lived experience. It also inserts itself widely into contemporary discourse, from the circumspect counsel of moral tracts to the brutal misogyny of Joseph Swetnam, who devotes a separate section of his notorious The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615) to the difficulties faced by a widow’s new husband. Brodsky observes that “age inequalities must have given bachelor–widow marriages a different character, providing greater opportunities for psychological and sexual dominance within marriage by the older woman” (128); Foyster points out that contemporary advice books made much of the power imbalance created by a disparity in wealth, and adds that widows’ propensity to “negotiat[e] . . . their own terms of marriage” contributed to the male view of them as “formiddably assertive marriage partners” (“Experienced Widow,” 117–18). Age and wealth, along with sexual, legal, and economic experience all factored into men’s anxious fantasies about the remarried widow as

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wife, making her simultaneously highly desirable and deeply threatening, a figure who, as I will argue, had the potential both to establish her husband’s manhood and to undermine it. The interplay of masculinity and the remarrying widow is suggested by a phrase that, for early modern men, seems to be irresistibly associated with marriage between a bachelor and a widow: the phrase is “to make a man.” In 1627, when an elderly Salter’s widow married her twenty-six-year-old servant, William Lilly, despite “the Disproportion of Years and Fortune being so great betwixt [them]” (19), some of the widow’s acquaintance objected to the inequality of the match. As Lilly records, though, she informed them “that she had no Kindred; if I proved kind, and a good Husband, she would make me a Man; if it proved otherwise, she only undid her self” (19). In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady (1613), Elder Loveless entreats the nameless Widow to “make a man” of his prodigal younger brother (3.2.182–83); Surly in Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) words his proposal to Dame Pliant in precisely the same way, suggesting that the widow might use her fortune to “make [him] a man” in gratitude for his preservation of her honour (4.6.13). In The Passionate Morrice (1593), the man who marries a widow gratefully reminds himself how “I am thus much beholden unto her . . . she made me a man, being before worse than nothing” (64). But when the widow in Jack of Newbury (1597) quarrels with her servant-turnedhusband, she throws the phrase in his teeth: “I pittying thy povertie, made thee a man, and maister of the house, but not to the end I woulde become thy slave” (Deloney, 22). “My estate hath made you a man,” complains a like-minded remarried widow in John Taylor’s A Juniper Lecture (1639), “before you had my estate, which my deare loving husband left mee, you were a begger, and not worth a groate” (46). Like the remarrying widow, the phrase holds both a promise and a threat. The promise goes beyond the purely financial sense of “making a man,” the sense still current in the expression “a made man” for someone who has suddenly acquired a fortune. Although the money and property a man could obtain through marriage to a wealthy widow were a significant part of her allure, it is wrong to let a modern concept of (and distaste for) “fortune hunting” obscure the more complex impulses which attracted men, especially younger men, to widows.1 To begin with, in early modern society, marriage itself “made a man,” in the sense that marrying and establishing a household was “a crucial stage in winning social recognition as an adult, fully masculine person” (Tosh, 3).2 As Steve Rappaport explains, male adulthood was marked by the acquisition of citizenship (gained by two-thirds of London men through the completion of an apprenticeship), a wife, and

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a household of one’s own, with the latter constituting the pivotal event in a youth’s transition to manhood (326–28). “We do not call any a yeoman,” observed Sir Thomas Smith in 1583, “till he be married, and have children, and as it were have some authoritie among his neighbours” (32). According to Esther Sowernam (1617), even the appellation “an honest man” is withheld from “yong men . . . till they be married, for that is the portion which they get by their wives. When they are once married, they are forthwith placed in the ranke of honest men” (23); the wife in the ballad “The Lamentation of a New Married Man” (c. 1630) counters her husband’s discontent by pointing out how only married men are permitted to climb the ladder of status and respectability. Echoed in the ballad, Sowernam’s claim about marriage and male “honesty” was evidently a commonplace: A Wife hath won you credit, a Wife makes you esteem’d, An honest man through marriage, now are you surely deem’d. (W. G. Day, 381)3

While marriage itself signified the attainment of manhood, marrying a widow could greatly accelerate and intensify the transition. Men were expected not to marry until they had amassed the means to set up a new household and provide for a family, which in the city generally meant an apprenticeship lasting into one’s mid-twenties followed by several years working under a master as a journeyman (Rappaport, 325–27). Marrying a widow – the only woman with both the means and the freedom to disregard a suitor’s social and economic status if she so pleased – allowed a man to wed earlier; stepping into the vacant place in an already established household, often complete with servants, apprentices, and a functioning business, instantly conferred upon him a level of status that could otherwise take years of toil to attain. The young Merchant Taylor whose match with a widow catapulted him into his company’s livery would have found himself on a rather different path had he begun married life with the neighbour’s maidservant. The appeal of a widow’s established household further appears as more than just the lure of personal enrichment when it is considered in the context of the often-articulated male perception of marriage as a daunting financial responsibility. Describing a youth’s passage to full adulthood, the court minutes of the Merchant Taylors’ company give a sense of the seriousness with which this transition was viewed: men at threshold of marriage and householding are described as “young beginners and newly e n t e r i n g

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into the world to deal for themselves . . . , which word ‘entering ’ does strike a great impression into the heart” (Rappaport, 328). The financial difficulties of “young beginners” led the London aldermen in 1556 to pass an act prohibiting apprentices from gaining the freedom of the city until the age of twenty-four, partly in an attempt to prevent “the overhasty marriages and oversoon setting up of households of and by the youth and young folks of the said city . . . [who] marry themselves as soon as ever they come out of their apprenticehood, be they never so young and unskilful.” Such marriages led to children on parish relief, and many other “mischiefs and inconveniences,” for the young men were “so poor that they scantly have of their proper goods wherewith to buy their marriage apparel and to furnish their houses with implements and other things necessary for the exercise of their occupations, whereby they should be able to sustain themselves and their families” (Rappaport, 325–26). The poverty of newly formed households seems to have been a perennial problem, though, for in 1624, William Whately warns: Very many after marriage, be put into the close stocks of miserie, want, and necessitie, not having wherewithall to provide convenient foode and rayment for themselves, and for their charge, which unawares, and without fore-sight, is now growne heavie upon them. It is an easie thing to fill one belly, and cloath one backe, and keepe something in the purse, when but one hand must fetch out of it: but to provide diet and attire for a wife, for many small children, for some servants; to pay for house-rent, and fewell, and candle; to disburse the compelled charges of the weaknesse of a wife, of children, of servants, and to bring up many with the fruite of one mans labour and industrie; this doth oftentimes proove farre lesse easie, then men in imagination can deeme it to be. (A Care Cloth, 56)

It was the husband’s duty to take “provident care” of his wife, supplying her with all “things needful” (Gouge, 396), and the master’s duty to “be carefull to provide for [his] families competent bodily provisions, that so they may live a peaceable and comfortable life under [his] roofe” (Griffith, 405). Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Forme of Household Government (1598) warns men of their “dutie not to be forgotten, namely, that husbands be diligent and carefull to make provision for their houses, to cloathe their wives decently, to bring up their children vertuously, and to pay their servants dulie: because in voluntary matters men may bee negligent, but the necessities of thir house doe neither suffer negligence or forgetfulness” (170). Although a bride’s portion – either provided by her family, or saved out of her own earnings – would help to defray the costs of setting up a household, such costs were generally perceived as the husband’s responsibility. As one defendant in a matrimonial enforcement case told the London consistory court in 1576,

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“a man must first be provided of a house and thinges necessarie before he should marrye” (Gowing, 167). Not only the subject of moralists’ warnings, the financial burden of maintaining a wife is a favourite theme of popular literature, where wives are regularly satirized as being idle and extravagant. Whereas “Prodigal Husband” ballads tend to focus on an individual’s deviance from the ideal,4 a ballad like “Anything for a quiet life: Or The Married mans bondage to a curst Wife” (1620) is as much about the “crooked cares of houshold charge” that “molest” the young husband as it is about his wife’s shrewishness. The ballad, which begins with a young man eager to finish his apprenticeship and marry, proceeds like a shopping list of the goods he is obliged to buy his wife: “Plums and Peares & Cherries ripe, / of twenty shillings a pound,” peascods, a caudle of muscadine, woodcocks, larks, “dainty Lawnes & Cambricks fine,” sugar plums, conserves, a “garded Gowne,” a “Petti-coat of Stammell red,” and a horse, in addition to the charges the birth of a child runs up in nurses’ fees and gossips’ feasts (Rollins, Pepys Ballads, vol. 2, 16–21).5 Swetnam’s enormously popular Araignment, which went through at least ten editions in nine years, focuses primarily on how women, and wives in particular, are a drain on a man’s purse. The tract’s opening line signals its continuing obsession: “Moses describeth a woman thus: At the first beginning (saith he) a woman was made to be a helper unto man, and so they are indeede, for she helpeth to spend & consume that which man painefully getteth” (1). As Diane Purkiss observes, “in Swetnam woman signifies the leakage into the market of goods that ought to be stored. She is a signifier of wastage, not merely the absence of productivity but a prodigal consumption of resources” (74). The perception that a wife was a financial burden would probably have been especially pronounced in the city: Cleaver states that “the dutie of the husband is to get goods: and of the wife to gather them together, and save them” (170), but as Susan Amussen notes, this concept is largely an urban one. Migrants to London, and those London-born citizens only a generation or two removed from their rural roots, would have seen their mothers and grandmothers at work in a rural economy where women’s economic production was at least as conspicuous as their consumption. Men were responsible for livestock and field crops, but women were in charge of the dairy, the brewhouse, the poultry, and the kitchen garden as well as what we traditionally think of as “housework.” Rural women were thus directly involved in producing much of the household’s sustenance, and in selling any surplus goods (Amussen, Ordered Society, 68–69). Since Alice Clark’s seminal study, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century

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(1919), historians have debated her claim that the rise of capitalism in the seventeenth century robbed women of the respect and status accorded to their work in an earlier era of domestic industry; however, one does not have to posit a pre-capitalist “golden age” for women, nor to argue that rural men actually held their wives’ work in high esteem, to suggest that the sheer visible difference between the productive labor of a rural wife and of an urban one would have made the latter appear idle, a spender rather than a getter.6 This is not to say that city wives did not work: the feeding, clothing, and boarding of a household which included servants and apprentices as well as husband and children, along with unpaid labor in the unskilled or semi-skilled parts of a husband’s craft or trade, made wives significant contributors to the urban economy (Rappaport, 41). As Prior points out, however, such work was generally considered to be simply a woman’s “duty,” as distinct from a man’s occupation (95). It did not, on the whole, produce quantifiable, marketable goods like butter, cheese, or beer. And what the urban housewife could not make, she was obliged to buy.7 The difference in male perceptions of country wives and of city wives is apparent in John Taylor’s series of satirical anecdotes, Divers Crabtree Lectures (1639): all the anecdotes depict shrewish wives, the first a farmer’s wife and the rest the wives of various city crafts- and tradesmen. Only the farmer’s wife, though, is given a good reason for her mistreatment of her husband: he ends up getting hit on the head with a frying pan because he interferes with her making of pancakes, “taking unjust exceptions at the courseness of the flower, the taste of the Suite, the thicknesse of the Batter, and the like,” while she, irritated at being “so crost and troubled in her businesse,” knows full well that “he was better experienced in the Plough, than the Panne” (4–5). The city wives, on the other hand, simply harangue their husbands at length for more sex and more luxuries. Taylor’s country wife may be a shrew, but she has a defined, productive role in which she rightly expects respect, while his city wives are little more than demanding parasites. To a certain extent, then, the young man who married a wealthy widow accomplished an enviable evasion of his patriarchal responsibilities to establish and provide for his new household.8 However fraught with anxiety male domestic responsibility may have been, though, any attempt at its evasion was at least equally problematic. When Swetnam shifts his focus from women and marriage in general to remarried widows – a category of women sufficiently exceptional, and, perhaps, a subject sufficiently popular, to merit a separately titled addendum, advertised on the title page as

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“The Bearbaiting or the vanity of Widdowes” – the reiteration of how a wife will waste her husband’s money is abruptly replaced by an emphasis on the widow’s control of the household economy: . . . if thou at any time are desirous to be merry in her company, she wil say thou art merry because thou hast gotten a wife that is able to maintaine thee, where before thou wast a begger and hadst nothing . . .; if thou make provision to fare well in thy house she will bid thee spend that which thou broughtest thy selfe. If thou shewe thy selfe sparing she will say thou shalt not pinch her of that which is her owne, and if thou doe anything contrary to her minde she will say her other husband was more kinde . . . if thou go abroad and spend any thing before thou comest home, she will say a begger I found thee and a begger thou meanest to leave me: if thou stay alwaies at home she will say thou art happy thou hast gotten a wife that is able to maintain thee idle. . . . (59–60)9

Given that the main body of the pamphlet is structured by a logic of gendered provision and consumption, and by a brand of misogyny which identifies women with the latter, there is more at stake here than the conventional trials of living with a shrew. In the section on widows, although the complaint is ostensibly that the husband is fettered by his wife, it is the husband who is the consumer; in the mouth of the remarried widow, all the contempt that the earlier part of the text had heaped upon women is now directed towards him. The threat to men is no longer the wastefulness of women, or even the misery inflicted by a scolding wife: it is that the man is now written into the woman’s position as consumer, waster, object of invective. The unexpectedly murderous twist to this section’s humor may be a measure of the anxiety aroused by this reversal: out of five jokey anecdotes about men unhappily married to widows, three feature the widow’s death, escalating with each tale from natural causes, to suicide, to a husband who throws his wife off a ship into a stormy sea (62–63). To return, then, to that phrase which so insistently crops up in the context of marriage to a widow – “to make a man” – we can see how it holds certain troubling implications for the husband whose status has been so obtained: if she has “made him a man,” then his manhood is dependent on her power and is not truly his own. Looking again at the Salter’s widow’s words about her choice of young Lilly – “if I proved kind, and a good Husband, she would make me a Man; if it proved otherwise, she only undid her self” – we can see that in terms of the financial sense of “making a man,” the statement is illogical, for under the law of coverture the act of marriage alone bestowed wealth on the husband, regardless of his subsequent behavior. The gap in her logic – he is already her husband, but she will “make him a

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Man” if he pleases her – harbors the phrase’s threatening subtext, suggesting the widow’s sense of her own control in the relationship. The remarried widow’s tirade in A Juniper Lecture implies even more clearly the potential for emasculation in “making a man.” Before she tells her new husband that “[her] estate has made [him] a man,” she taunts him with what she is withholding from him: “I had a man before, but now I have a foole . . . I have a bagge in store that you shall never know of, nor be a penny the better for it, no nor any of yours neither, for using me in this manner” (45–46). With its play on the common dual meaning of “bag” as both “purse” and “scrotum,” the widow’s speech has an undercurrent of symbolic castration: the husband has been “made a man” and yet is not a man, for, having created his manhood with her wealth, the wife is bent on keeping both the money and his masculinity firmly in her own grip. With the advantage in age, marital experience, and wealth, she is well equipped to appropriate the masculine role in the household and to maintain, or at least to put up a skillful struggle for, authority over the domestic affairs, the family property, and the husband himself. William Gouge (1622) warns his readers: “If a rich woman marry a poor man she will looke to be the master, and to rule him: so as the order which God hath established will be cleane perverted: and the honour of mariage laid in the dust” (190); as his use of “master” rather than “mistress” in this context implies, the feared relationship between a rich widow and her new husband involves the emasculating exchange of gendered roles.10 And a widow’s maturity proves as potent as her wealth in a comic sketch from The Bachelor’s Banquet (1603), wherein an unfortunate young man finds himself wedded to “a lusty widow of a middle age and much experience, who, by the trial which she had of her first husband, knows how to handle the second”: Her first attempt is to usurp superiority and to become his head, and this she obtains without any great difficulty, for there is nothing so lavish as a simple and well-natured young man, being in subjection – that is, married – to a widow, especially if she be, as most of them are, of a perverse and crabbed nature. (125–26)

The widow’s new husband is here reduced to the traditional status of a wife. The threat to masculinity attendant upon marrying a widow is perhaps best understood in the terms laid out by Mark Breitenberg. Observing that “masculinity” and “femininity” are “historically specific deployments of gender differences sensible only in relation to one another” (8),

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Breitenberg describes how masculinity in a patriarchal society is inherently and inevitably anxious, for such a society “always and only sustains itself in constant defense of the privileges of some of its members and by the constraint of others,” and therefore “those individuals whose identities are formed by the assumption of their own privilege must also have incorporated varying degrees of anxiety about the preservation or potential loss of that privilege” (3). As he argues, both “identity” and “anxiety” are best understood in the early modern period as social phenomena (as opposed to the modern, psychoanalytic concept of them as individual, psychic phenomena), based preeminently in such factors as “property, reputation, and status” (12). “Anxious masculinity,” then, is “the internalization of specifically social tensions that are endemic to the early modern sex-gender system” (13). The man who wished to marry a widow contemplated entering a position which incited anxiety specifically in respect to property, reputation, and status: the family property was legally his, but his control would be contested by the widow who had furnished it; his reputation and status were enhanced by his new role as a wealthy householder, but simultaneously threatened by the widow’s attempt to usurp superiority and reduce him to the conventional laughingstock of a husband “in subjection.” In the early modern theatre, these anxieties interact readily with the traditional structures of comedy. As Leo Salingar describes, the typical comic marriage plot, inherited from Roman New Comedy, involves “a struggle over money occasioned by love,” where, in the defeat of the elderly blocking figures, money is conveyed from the older generation to the younger (122; 127). But in cases where a widow, rather than a young maiden, is the desired marital object, the New Comedy marriage plot is frequently overlaid with a second, contradictory paradigm – that of the Prodigal Son play.11 Evolving from a blend of the native morality play and the “Christian Terence” tradition in which Continental drama moralized Classical sources, the English Prodigal Son play is defined by Ervin Beck as one focused on “a young man [who] has departed from the values of his forebears – values which the play assumed he ought to reembrace” (110). It is, as Beck claims, “a precise inversion of the paradigm of youth in New Comedy,” where “the young hero is usually vindicated and the older generation is discredited” (110–11). What happens, though, when the prodigal marks his return to the values of his forebears by marrying a wealthy widow? Such marriages hang in an uneasy balance between the resolutions of New Comedy and those of Prodigal Son comedy. The young man has defeated the

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senex generation (represented by older, wealthier rivals, and by the widow’s own scruples against his poverty and youth) to win the woman and the money he desires, but as the woman he marries is, to a certain extent, a member of the generation he has supposedly defeated, the young prodigal’s traditionally happy assimilation back into society now comes at the risk of his being placed in subjection to a “father” figure who does not hold a father’s unproblematic right to authority – his new wife, the remarried widow. The subplot of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady ends with the unresolved tension of precisely this dilemma. Thinking his elder brother dead, Young Loveless engages in a wild round of prodigality, drinking and wenching with a bevy of parasitic companions, and finally sells his newly inherited lands to the usurer Morecraft. Elder Loveless returns in time to prevent the usurer from taking possession of the lands – and Young Loveless gets to keep the money, which he uses to buy himself a knighthood. Along with Morecraft’s money, the young prodigal manages to attract the interest of Morecraft’s intended bride, a rich, nameless, grocer’s Widow who is determined to become a lady by marrying a knight. But as Elder Loveless presses the Widow to agree to the match – “Faith bee not mercilesse, but make a man; hees young and handsome, though he be my brother, and his observances may deserve your love: hee shall not fall for meanes” (3.2.182– 85) – the implications of that equivocal phrase quickly become explicit. The Widow’s attraction to Young Loveless has always been mingled with a desire to reform him – during his dealings with the usurer, she warns him not to sell his lands, and wishes he were “wiser” (3.2.30–31; 2.3.132) – and now she is invested with the authority his elder brother had attempted to exercise over him: “Now brother I should chide,” declares Elder Loveless, “but Ile give no distaste to your faire Mistrisse, I wil instruct her in’t, and she shall doo’t: you have bin wild, and ignorant, ’pray mend it” (3.2.190–93). The Widow does chide him: as they are on their way to church to be married, she urges him to abandon his old friends: Pray Sir cast off these fellowes, as unfitting For your bare knowledge, and farre more your company: Ist fit such Ragamuffins as these are, Should beare the name of friends? and furnish out A civill house? y’are to be marryed now, And men that love you must expect a course Farre from your old carrire: If you will keepe um, Turn um toth’ stable, and there make um groomes: (4.2.1–8)

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His companions try to silence her by bawdily reminding her of the pleasures she will enjoy that night, but she insists that her new husband “shall be civill / And slip off these base trappings” (4.2.24–25). Faced with this challenge, Younger Loveless adroitly changes the subject from the unsuitability of his companions to the cost of keeping them, parodying his prescribed new role as careful husband in a long, witty disquisition on how cheap it is to provide for men who consume nothing but ale (4.2.62–100). The Widow appears to submit, and the men head off to church in uproarious celebration, but her response is in fact slyly ambiguous: You have halfe perswaded me, pray use your pleasure: And my good friends since I doe know your dyet, I’le take an order, meate shall not offend you, You shall have ale. (4.2.101–04)

Apart from demonstrating her continued control over her household simply by maintaining the position of one entitled to grant or withhold consent, she may well intend to starve the men out of her house. No more is said on the matter, but when the newlywed couple appears in the play’s final scene, Young Loveless’s companions – who have surrounded him continuously since act one, scene two – are conspicuously absent. Juxtaposed with the unequivocal, even humiliating, submission that Elder Loveless exacts in his marriage to the scornful (maiden) lady of the title, the distribution of power in the subplot’s match remains uncertain. The remarrying widow who exerts her authority to reform a prodigal, however, is one of the figure’s less threatening manifestations. Rather than imposing order on a reluctant youth, the remarried widow is more frequently the cause of household disorder, as is strikingly depicted in Patient Grissil (1600), by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton.12 In a subplot which functions as a foil to the Griselda story, Gwenthyan, a rich Welsh widow, puts her new husband, Sir Owen, through endless misery as she fights to rule the household and to do as she pleases with “her” money. Had Sir Owen paid attention during his courtship of Gwenthyan, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble, for the widow reveals exactly what she expects from a husband. When Sir Owen assures her that he is wise and valiant (2.1.183–84), she replies, “Sir Owen, Sir Owen, tis not for faliant, Gwenthyan care so much, but for honest and fertuous, and loving and pundall to leade her have her will” (2.1.192–94). Dismissing the traditional male attributes of wisdom and courage, Gwenthyan instead demands the qualities that men conventionally seek in a wife: love, virtue, honesty (in the feminine sense of sexual fidelity?), and submission. Although Sir Owen believes he

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can “pridle her well enoughe” (2.1.196), he has in fact got himself into a marriage where he is expected to take the subordinate, “feminine” role. Predictably enough, at Sir Owen’s next appearance, he is begging Gwalter to teach him how to tame his wife, but only gets the enigmatic advice to cut three green osiers and lay them safely away. Sir Owen has much to do to keep Gwenthyan from breaking the osiers (she assumes he intends to beat her with them), and finally cajoles her into quiet with promises of a new coach and attendants, only to have a fresh quarrel break out over an expensive rebato she has bought for herself. When he forbids her to pay for it, Gwenthyan furiously asserts her control over the couple’s money by tearing up some valuable bonds she brought to the marriage: g we n t h yan: Is domineere now, you teare her ruffes and repatoes, you preake her ponds? Ile teare as good pondes, and petter too, and petter too. si r owe n : Owe Gwenthyan, Cods plude is five thousand duckets, hold hold hold, a pogs on her pride, what has her done? g we n t h yan: Goe loog, is now paide for her repatoes, ile have her willes and desires, ile teadge her pridle her Lady. . . . (3.2.264–270)

True to the warnings in moral tracts and popular literature, the widow Gwenthyan proves herself one of those intractable wives who “will looke to bee obeied, as wel for that shee hath been before acquainted with love matters, as also because . . . they bring greater wealth unto their husbands, then the maides doe” (Batty, 97). Not satisfied with this revenge, she further demonstrates her control by inviting a swarm of beggars to devour a feast her husband has arranged for Gwalter and his courtiers, meeting the guests with her house a mess and herself in rags. As Gwenthyan and Sir Owen bewilder their servants with contradictory commands, and reports trickle in of chaos in the kitchen where “the Cookes curse her Lady, and some pray for our Lord” (4.3.128–29), the episode extends the effects of a remarried widow’s insubordination beyond the personal strife of a couple to show how it creates a disordered household. And in case one is tempted to think that Gwenthyan is just an irascible individual, Sir Owen points out the specific source of his troubles: sir Owen is pridled I warrant: widdows (were petter Gods plude marry whoore) were petter be hang’d and quarter, then marry widdowes as God udge me: Sir Owen fall on her knees, and pray God to tag her to mercy, or else put petter minde in her Lady: awl prittish Shentlemans tag heed how her marry fixen widowes. (3.2.272–77)

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As Gwalter neatly sums up this emasculating marriage, “doe what he can, / I doubt his wife will prove the better man” (4.3.171–72). Toward the end, the plot flirts with the idea that the traditional gender hierarchy might be restored, for Gwenthyan announces she was only testing her husband, and now plans to make him her head (5.2.261–65). But the widow cannot truly be mastered: a few lines later, she invites wives in the audience who “have husbands that you would pridle, set your hand to Gwenthian’s pill, for tis not fid that poore womens should be kept alwaies under” (5.2.290–92). Evidently, Gwenthyan and Sir Owen are a comment on the Griselda story of the main plot – while Grissil submits meekly to Gwalter’s ill-treatment, Gwenthyan declares her determination that her husband will not make her “such ninny pobbie foole as Grissil ” (3.2.202) – but critics disagree as to whether the subplot upholds or undercuts the latter’s conventional moral of wifely submission and patience.13 Oddly enough, all the debate about the play’s “moral” tends to overlook the very specific moral that Gwalter clearly explains at the end of the play. Paying little attention to the fact that Gwenthyan is not just an unmanageable wife but a remarried widow, and perhaps unaware of contemporary notions of the relative merits of widows and maids as wives, critics have failed to notice that the play makes use of the conventional widow/maid contrast to evade as far as possible the problems of moralizing Griselda. Richard Levin, for instance, explains both couples as extreme deviations from the mean, with Gwenthyan’s shrewishness and Grissil’s subjection, Sir Owen’s docility and Gwalter’s tyranny at opposite ends of the spectrum of marital behaviour.14 Levin sees a problem with this structure, however, for “the values of the folktale source of the main plot dictate that Grissil’s utter self-abnegation be treated as the wifely ideal” and require that Gwalter’s tyranny be accepted “as the prerogative of his sex (and rank) as well as a justifiable subterfuge designed to demonstrate her worthiness” (50). What he does not note is that the play seeks to use Gwenthyan and Sir Owen to dodge the question of Gwalter’s rights and Grissil’s example altogether. Essentially, the conventional ideas about unmanageable remarried widows played out in the subplot function to impose an unexpected moral on the Griselda story. In the final scene, Gwalter asks Sir Owen to bring out his three osiers, and uses them to illustrate his wife-taming technique – which turns out to have as much to do with selecting a wife as with controlling her. When Sir Owen tries to braid his now-dry osiers, they snap in pieces, while Gwalter’s, braided on the day he cut them, are bent to their new shape. The marquess then explains his lesson:

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy I tride my Grissils patience when twas greene, Like a young Osier, and I moulded it Like waxe to all impressions: married men That long to tame their wives must curbe them in, Before they need a bridle, then they’ll proove All Grissils full of patience, full of love, .................................. But you Sir Owen giving her the head, As you gave liberty to those three wandes, Shee’ll breake as those doe, if you bend her now. . . . (5.2.238–49)

Although Gwalter implies that Sir Owen might have tamed his wife had he been firm from the beginning, the symbolism of the green and dry osiers, taken together with what the audience has seen of the two women, also strongly suggests that the secret of having a good wife lies in the choice: even before marriage, the older, wealthy, widowed Gwenthyan had none of the poor, young maiden Grissil’s submissive patience. Unsatisfactory as this moral may be to contain the issues raised by the main plot, it provides the playwrights with an original way to at least try to sidestep the problem that has plagued tellers of the Griselda story since Chaucer: how is the hearer to apply the tale’s example to his or her own life? A contemporary chapbook, The Ancient True and Admirable History of Patient Grisel (1619), could explicitly offer Griselda as a model for wives, but a trio of commercial playwrights who needed to appeal to the widest possible audience could run into difficulty doing the same. Nor was it feasible for a stage production to act out Chaucer’s abstract, ungendered moral about steadfast patience in adversity and obedience to God’s will.15 By imposing a moral declaring that maids make good wives who do not require taming, while remarried widows are ungovernable, the play attempts to exploit the popularity of the Griselda story while remaining as palatable and unexceptionable as the latest humorous anecdote. Gwenthyan’s theatrical appeal – her irrepressible energy, her blunt contempt for Grissil, her direct address to women in the audience – may actually work to make her a more attractive and less anxiety-inducing figure than the one-dimensionsal ranting widows of Taylor’s or Swetnam’s comic prose. William Rowley’s A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed, however, shows that the stage figure of the domineering remarried widow can also be portrayed as a serious threat. Like Patient Grissil, A New Wonder uses a widow as a foil to its version of the ideal wife: here, not a maiden but the charitable Widow discussed in the previous chapter, whose choice of

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the bankrupt Stephen as her husband exemplifies the kind of generosity to which widows are exhorted in The Passionate Morrice. The Widow’s comical “selfishness” in marrying a young prodigal for the personal benefit of experiencing affliction is endorsed by the play’s moral touchstone, the generous merchant Bruyne – his own take on charity for spiritually “selfish” motives being “This is a Maxime sure, / Some are made poore, that rich men by giving may encrease their store” (1.1.58–60) – but Mistris Foster, a widow newly married to Old Foster when the play begins, is portrayed as the root of the quarrels that are tearing the Foster family apart. Whereas the Widow urges Stephen to spend her money, to “spare it not; doe [his] worst” (2.1.278), Mistris Foster is wholly preoccupied with safeguarding the money she brought to her second marriage; whereas the Widow blithely disregards advice to “take heede how you give away the head; it stands yet upon the shoulders of your widdowhood” (1.2.13–14), and has no desire to usurp marital headship for herself, Mistris Foster’s control over “her” money extends itself to control over Old Foster’s relations with his kin, with near disastrous results. Robert, Old Foster’s son from a previous marriage, is using the family’s money for the charitable relief of his uncle Stephen, who is imprisoned for debt. The virtuous Bruyne sees Robert’s behavior as “a naturall Nephewes part,” but his wife’s financially based dominance in the household forces Old Foster to disagree: Tis in neither well, Sir, for note but the condition of my estate; I’me lately marryed to a wealthy Widow from whom my substance chiefely does arise, she has observed this in her son in law, often complaines and grudges at it, and what foule broyles such civill discords bring, few married men are ignorant of. (1.1.84–89)

As “present proofe” (1.1.90), Mistris Foster bursts onto the stage demanding “Shall I not live to breath a quiet houre? I would I were a beggar with content rather than thus be thwarted for mine owne” (1.1.91–93). At her urging, Old Foster disowns both brother and son, and is providentially punished with sudden bankruptcy. Even then, she berates her husband for having “made hot haste to empty all my Ware-houses” (3.3.165–70) and scolds away any tendencies toward repentance, counseling him to still “scorne” his son (3.3.194). Just as the Widow’s generosity reforms Stephen, Mistris Foster’s selfish preoccupation with “her” money almost destroys her husband. In the end, Mistris Foster too is reformed by the Widow’s kindness, but the Foster family saga remains a powerful reminder of the turmoil that could arise when the remarried widow continued to designate the household wealth as “mine owne.”

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The disruptive histrionics of a Gwenthyan or a Mistris Foster, however, tend to obscure the fact that a remarried widow’s potential for practical, day-to-day power over the household money and property was not so easily tied to any recognizable figure of the “bad wife.” For one thing, the authors of early modern domestic conduct literature, whom we might most expect to uphold a husband’s absolute economic rights, evidently recognize that the theory of coverture translated into a variety of practices, and even disagree among themselves regarding the extent of a wife’s economic freedom within the marriage. On one side, William Perkins (1609) argues that without the husband’s consent, the wife could only dispose of things either “reserved upon the match made between them [i.e., through a legal premarital contract], or else peculiar unto her by their mutuall consent,” and not of “the goods which are common to them both” (175). On the other, though, Henry Smith (1591) castigates the husband who says “that which is thine is mine, and that which is mine is mine owne,” and observes that the wife may justly reply “he which hath given me himselfe, can he denie me any thing? The bodie is better than the goodes; therefore if the bodie be myne, the goods are mine to” (52–53). Brathwait (1618) agrees that the married couple should “join in purse as they doe joine in care,” though for the more cynical reason that the wife who sees herself limited in this way is likely to try to cheat her husband out of his goods anyway (“Good Wife,” sig. B6r). Matthew Griffith (1633) evaluates both sides of the dispute – “Some hold that a wife hath no power to dispose of any thing, meerely of her selfe, but only by allowance . . . Others (as wide on the other side) think that the wife hath right, and power, over her husbands goods to give, when, and what, and to whom she pleaseth” – and attempts to reach a compromise. However, the three criteria he proposes to justify the wife’s disposal of property are so open to interpretation that they would likely incite more conflict than they would resolve: the wife does not require consent if her action tends to God’s glory and her husband’s good; or if her husband is “an Enemie to the workes of Mercy”; or if – a particularly incendiary loophole – her husband is “Foolish and weake, and not able to discerne what is good for himselfe, and his family” (331–33). Of all the moralists, Gouge gets the most embroiled in the question of a wife’s right to the family goods, devoting an extraordinary sixteen pages to explicating degrees of consent, investigating exceptional cases, disputing posited objections, and evaluating legal issues. He comes out on the side of near-absolute male control, but he examines the issue in such detail precisely because this was the one aspect of wifely submission that

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his female parishioners were not prepared to swallow. Having once been attacked on the matter, Gouge is on the defensive: I remember that when these Domesticall Duties were first uttered out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wife’s subjection to the restraining of her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husband’s consent. But surely they that made these exceptions did not well thinke of the Cautions and Limitations which were then delivered, and are now againe expressly noted: which are, that the foresaid restraint be not extended to the proper goods of a wife, no nor overstrictly to such goods as are set apart for the use of the family, nor to extraordinary cases, nor alwaies to an expresse consent, nor to the consent of such husbands as are impotent, or farre and long absent. If any other warrantable caution shall be shewed me, I will be as willing to admit it, as any of these. (sig. 3v)

Out of a treatise that lays down all the rules of domestic hierarchy in impressively thorough detail, it was the denial of authority over the day to day administration of money and goods that enraged the wives of Gouge’s congregation. For while many other facets of a wife’s subjection to her husband could be nebulous and hypothetical, the question of who controlled the money was about power of a very concrete and immediate kind. And if wives in general so staunchly defended their right to the family purse, it is not surprising that widows were feared to expect a threatening share of household authority when they had contributed the bulk of the household’s wealth. When Perkins concedes a wife’s ability to dispose of goods “reserved upon the match” (175), he refers to a practice which widows, in particular, frequently used to gain an extra measure of financial freedom within a marriage. Erickson points out that historians have tended to overstate the economic powerlessness of married women, in an anachronistic emphasis on the strictures of early modern English common law which “ignored all married women with the legal fiction of coverture, the idea that a husband and wife were one person and that one was the husband” (“Settlements,” 24). Seventeenth-century Englishwomen and men, she explains, would have understood that marriage and inheritance were not governed exclusively by common law, but by a range of alternatives available under equity, ecclesiastical, and manorial law. Accordingly, a widow would often assert her right to her own property at the outset of a second marriage by securing a portion of it to her independent use in a legal settlement of separate estate, defensible in equity (“Settlements,” 21–24). While any woman about to be married could make a settlement, a widow was about twice as likely to do so than a first-time bride, being “older, perhaps wealthier, and wiser at

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least in the ways of legal coverture than she had been the first time around” (Erickson, Women and Property, 149, 123);16 she might also be motivated by consideration for her children, or by future financial obligations as the executrix or administratrix of a will (Stretton, 121), and her widowhood usually had already given her some experience of the courts and of legal affairs, making the settlement process less intimidating.17 Typically, the settlement would involve the conveyance, with her future husband’s knowledge, of part of the widow’s property to a trusted third party to be kept for her use; she was not supposed to dispose of anything secretly between her betrothal and wedding, although there was some uncertainty over the legality of her doing so. A Chancery commentator in 1601 tried to specify the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices: If a widdow for the advancement of her child or kinsman in bloud doe give a lease or make a Bond or gives goods & after takes a husband who knowes not of this gift, my Lord will uphold the guift for the consideracions sake being naturall affeccion. But if a widdow doe contract marriage with any man & before consumacion thereof doe secretly assigne Leases, make Bonds or deeds of guift to the end to cosen her new husband, this my Lord by noe meanes likes. (Stretton, 53)

The second half of this formula suggests that the period between betrothal and consummation was something of a grey area with regard to a woman’s right to dispose of her goods: does “to contract marriage” here mean to betroth oneself (and if so, does it matter if it is de praesenti or de futuro?) or, in fact, to marry? How can one determine that the woman was acting with the intent “to cosen her new husband” rather than out of “naturall affeccion” for the gift’s beneficiary? Why does the commentator specify “consumacion” instead of the solemnization of matrimony? If we turn to Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals (1686),18 it would appear that the law grants a woman absolute power over her goods until the solemnization – not the consummation – of a matrimonial contract: Spousals de praesenti or de futuro, consummate with Carnal knowledge, have the same effect as hath Matrimony Solemnized; yet by the Laws of this Realm it is otherwise: So that neither Spousals de praesenti, neither Spousals de futuro consummate, do make her Goods his, or his Goods hers: and hence it is, that a Woman contracted in Matrimony, dying before the celebration of the Marriage, may make her Testament, and dispose of all her Goods, at her own pleasure, which after Solemnization of the Marriage she cannot do, without his license and Consent: And on the other side the Man dying intestate before the Celebration of the Marriage, the Woman to whom he was betroathed surviving, cannot obtain the Administration of his Goods, as his Widow, which otherwise, the Marriage being Solemnized, she might do. (235)

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Early modern practice, however, reveals a good deal more ambiguity than Swinburne allows on this issue; records suggest that couples who chose to dispense with solemnization did so in full expectation that they would still assume the usual property rights conveyed by coverture (Sokol and Sokol, 97). A widow who conveyed her estate after betrothal but before consummation, or after consummation but before solemnization would have been taking a considerable risk. There was nothing at all, though, to prevent a widow with no immediate marriage prospects from conveying money or goods to whom she pleased and marrying later without the new husband’s knowledge of the arrangement. Some men, like Henry Percy in his marriage to Dorothy Perrot, inevitably found their expectations defeated by a conveyance: Chancery and the Court of Requests dealt with a number of second husbands who alleged that their wives had created premarital trusts “subtilye” or “in vearye secreate maner” with the intent to defraud them (Stretton, 122–23; Erickson, Women and Property, 123–24). One such case was that of Anne Middleton, mother of the playwright Thomas Middleton. It is tempting to speculate, in fact, that a childhood spent in the midst of his mother and step-father’s litigious marriage may have resulted in Thomas Middleton’s unusually strong interest in the remarrying widow as a dramatic subject, although only his early comedy, The Phoenix (1604), contains a plot which bears any resemblance to his family situation. The Phoenix will be discussed in chapter 4, and other plays by Middleton in chapter 5; Anne Middleton’s financial dealings, however, offer a remarkable example of the power of a widow’s premarital trust. Widowed in January 1585/6, with two small children, about three hundred and thirty-five pounds, and several leases, Anne took her late husband’s advice and conveyed the entire family property in trust to three men of the Inner Temple. The trustees reconveyed part of the property back to Anne for ten years, and conveyed the remainder to five-year-old Thomas and his three-year-old sister Avis. In November of that same year, Anne married Thomas Harvey, a grocer who had just returned – in debt – to London after a stint as chief factor in Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke. Harvey apparently agreed to the match in full knowledge that Anne had earlier conveyed everything away from any second husband, even meeting formally with her trustees, but immediately after the marriage he began a series of lawsuits in the Court of Requests to get the property into his own hands. As far as can be discerned from the records, though, Harvey managed to do little more than make himself a tremendous nuisance: his suit to wrest Anne’s leases from her trustees was dismissed with an admonishment to cease his “injurious dealinges” towards them (Phialas, 189); he was further frustrated

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when Anne ensured the safety of the children’s portions by having herself arrested for them in the Lord Mayor’s court, whereupon Harvey, responsible for his wife’s debts under coverture, was forced to “suffer his goodes to be sould at an outcrye at his doore” to raise enough cash to pay the portions into the Guild Hall (Eccles, 520). On another occasion, when Harvey transferred Anne’s power of attorney over one of the leases to his brotherin-law, John Sackvill, fourteen of her tenants took exception to this “secreet and ffraudulent conveyaunce” and sued Sackvill (Christian, “A Sidelight,” 494). Fifteen years into the marriage, Harvey made his final attempt, this time claiming, among other things, that Anne had illegally conveyed her property after, rather than before the marriage, with the intent to defraud him; Anne’s reply, corroborated by one of the surviving trustees, assures the court that the conveyance took place in her widdowhoodd bona fide, before she marryed w[i]th the said Complaynant or had contracted marryadge, or had agreed uppon marryadge, or before there was any acquaintance, speeche, or Conference betweene her this defendant and the said Complaynant for or concerning her said marryadge and not to or uppon any such intent use or purpose as the said Complaynant in his bill suggesteth but merely for and towards the benefytt, advauncement and preferment of Thomas Middleton and Avis Middleton . . . (PRO Req 2/87/44)

The quarrels and lawsuits between Anne and Harvey were interminable and sometimes vicious – at one point, she accused him of trying to poison her, and he was briefly imprisoned – but the balance of power seems to have been on Anne’s side, not Harvey’s, and in the end, her children duly received their inheritances. Anne had conveyed her estate in such a way that he was unable to assert a husband’s legal right to it, and the records show a man forced to beg and (literally) sue for money from his wife, not a husband who was able to seize it as his prerogative.19 Other men seem to have acquiesced, at least for the duration of the marriage, in their wives’ decisions to settle money away from them: when Charles Pressye married the widow Janevive Deane around 1600, he not only submitted to her transfer of a large sum of cash in trust to her son-inlaw, but moved into her London home in which she proceeded to imprint all her goods with a mark “soe shee might still keep hir owne stock and goodes whole, in apparancie to the world”; only some twenty years later, after Janevive’s death, did Pressye sue her grandson, whom she had named executor, over the details of the arrangement (Erickson, Women and Property, 123). Whether a widow’s settlement for separate estate was disputed or accepted by her new husband, it was a well-known token of her propensity to keep a

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hand on what was her own. The symbolic power of the settlement is evident in the gossip surrounding Dorothy Unton’s second marriage in 1598: along with her stipulation that she maintain complete control of her own income and property, she was said to have demanded the right “to choose another bedfellow” in case she should “find fault with her husband’s unsufficiency” (Strong, 107). The threat of the widow who conveys her property is raised in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), where Dame Purecraft functions as a highly equivocal prize. Quarlous, who sets himself up as the play’s final unmasker of folly, tricks the Puritan widow Purecraft into marrying him, but his doing so constitutes the unmasking of his own folly. In marrying Purecraft for her money, Quarlous flies in the face of his own common sense. As numerous critics have noted, Quarlous abandons his own principles against widowhunting when he is tempted by Purecraft’s lucrative offer of marriage.20 Ignoring what he has earlier told Winwife about having to live with the widow who brings the wealth, he suddenly decides “Why should I not marry the money when ’tis offered me?” (5.2.71–72), a decision which, along with his underhanded treatment of Winwife, undercuts his authority at the end when he declares his triumph and rebukes Overdo (Ostovich, 48–49). Quarlous’s advice against marrying a rich old widow is perhaps most memorable for its repellently graphic description of sexual relations with such a wife as visiting “a tomb, with a torch or three handfuls of link flaming hot . . . so thou mayst hap to make ’em feel thee” (1.3.63–64). The point he urges in this speech, however, is not merely that no wealth is worth such misery, but that getting paid at all for one’s sexual toil is a very uncertain proposition. If her new husband can please her (a nearly impossible physical task), he will “come to inherit according to [his] inches” (1.3.64–65); otherwise, the widow will ensure he never gets the money he married her for: “And all this, for the hope of two apostle-spoons, to suffer! And a cup to eat a caudle in! For that will be thy legacy. She’ll ha’ conveyed her state safe enough from thee, an’ she be a right widow” (1.3.83–86). Notably, Quarlous envisages even these trivial items of property becoming the husband’s only after the widow’s death, as his “legacy.” That he might enjoy his wife’s wealth while she is still alive does not even enter into the bargain, for any “right widow” will have conveyed it away to her own use. Given Quarlous’s appraisal of marriage to Purecraft, the detail that she intends to marry only a madman (on the advice of her fortune-tellers) becomes particularly comic, for he has made it quite clear that any man would have to be mad to marry her. But when Quarlous disguises himself as

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the madman Trouble-all to discover how he has fared in the lottery for Grace Welborn’s hand, he unintentionally attracts Purecraft’s interest. Purecraft, eager to win Trouble-all for her husband, tells him that she is “worth six thousand pound,” which she has amassed by arranging marriages between rich widows and “decayed brethren,” and between poor virgins and wealthy bachelors and widowers. In each case, the poorer spouse pays Purecraft with a third of the richer spouse’s wealth, and to extract her fee from the latter kind of marriage, she teaches the wives to “steal from their husbands when I have confirmed them in the faith and got all put into their custodies” (5.2.45, 51, 54–55). “And if I ha’ not my bargain,” she continues, “they may sooner turn a scolding drab into a silent minister than make me leave pronouncing reprobation and damnation unto them” (5.2.55–58). Having revealed her ways to him, Purecraft begs the disguised Quarlous to marry her and to “enjoy all my deceits together” (5.2.63). When Quarlous “considers with himself of it,” he looks no further than the gleam of money: “Why should I not marry this six thousand pound, now I think on’t? And a good trade, too, that she has beside, ha?” (5.2.67–68). But given his own warning to Winwife, this ought to be anything but a rhetorical question. Quarlous himself has pointed out in great detail that one does not marry “six thousand pound” but “a carcass that thou hast bound thyself to alive” (1.3.58–59), and more importantly, that a widow’s predilection for conveyances means that marrying the carcass does not automatically ensure access to the six thousand pound anyway. Although one might argue that Purecraft’s self-revelation has put her into his power, Quarlous ought also to have noticed that Purecraft has just told him what he can expect from her as a wife. By her own admission, she is skilled at getting a husband to turn over his own property to his wife’s custody, and is an indefatigable “scolding drab” to anyone who tries to keep her from her money. And although Purecraft may have been happy to share the fruits of her deceits with Trouble-all, she is not quite so pleased to find herself contracted to an imposter, and may be rather less generous to him. It is unclear at the end of the play whether Quarlous and Purecraft are in fact fully married or merely contracted and licensed to marry. Quarlous thanks Trouble-all for his “wife” (5.6.76), but the term could apply to either situation; he has a license and a warrant with her signature (5.2.72–106), but makes no mention of either taking her to church or consummating the match. If Quarlous has somehow managed to marry Purecraft before he removes his disguise, he may well have prevented her from conveying her state away from him as he knows a “right widow” will do. But if he has not, he is running an enormous risk. By not clarifying this point, Jonson

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leaves the suspicion that Quarlous has been hoisted on his own petard, for a Jacobean audience would have known that an unconsummated spousal contract does not legally prevent the woman from disposing of her property as she pleases. When Quarlous reveals that he is “mad but from the gown outward” (5.6.56), he silences Purecraft before she can protest: “Nay, I can be mad, sweetheart, when I please still, never fear me” (5.6.76–77). His words are perhaps a threat, perhaps a sexual promise, or perhaps both, but neither bodes well for the marriage to come. If Quarlous is threatening anger, the widow can match him in scolding; if he is promising sex, he is undertaking the life of repugnant sexual drudgery against which he warned Winwife at the start.21 And so as Quarlous gleefully declares his triumph and exposes Overdo’s foolish blindness, the evidence of his own blindness is right there at his side. As Helen Ostovich writes, “No one [in Jonson’s comedies] emerges morally superior, or wins an unambiguous reward” (54). In Bartholomew Fair the ambiguous reward is a widow for a wife: Winwife, due to Quarlous’s underhanded plot, gets a desirable wife but none of her money; the joke is on Quarlous, however, who gets a thoroughly undesirable wife – and probably none of her money either.22 Of course, not all widows conveyed their property, and, inevitably, some found themselves victimized by cruel or unscrupulous second husbands rather than in a position to be domineering, or even self-sufficient. Warnings against young men who feign love and then lay waste to a widow’s estate appear in a pair of ballads from the 1620s: “A merry new Song of a rich Widdowes wooing, / That married a young man to her undoing” (Rollins, Pepys Ballads, vol. 1, 257–61) recounts the tale of an elderly widow whose young husband reduces her to beggary within a week, and eventually starves her to death; “The Cunning Age, or a re-married Woman repenting her Marriage / Rehearsing her Husband’s dishonest carriage” takes the form of a dialogue in which the unhappily remarried widow cautions a still-single widow not to make the same mistake: The greife that I suffer can hardly be told Among Whores and Knaves he consumeth my gold, And if I reproove him, he tels me I scold, I dare not dispose of mine owne as I would. (Rollins, Garland, 239–43)

In response, her friend decides to dismiss her own two suitors, vowing, “Well, by your example I warning will take / With no Skip-jacke boy a match I will make.” Significantly, neither ballad sets itself against remarriage per se,

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but rather suggests that such problems are the result of ill-advised matches between the old and the young: “A merry new Song” is unsympathetic and facetious toward lust and title-hunting in a very old woman (her age is emphasized at every turn with references to her “old blood,” her “mumbling gums,” and her “consumed carkasse”), while “The Cunning Age” repeatedly terms the new husband a “Boy” and offers a roughly analogous sequel in which a young woman repents her mercenary marriage to a supposedly rich old widower. The apocryphal story of Dame Annis a` Clere, a widow “as old in years, as rich in substance” who drowns herself after being ruined and abandoned by her young husband, serves the same cautionary purpose in Niccholes’s A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (18). Records of marital separation cases from the London Consistory Court vividly flesh out the conflicting assumptions about marital property and the gendered domestic hierarchy inherent in the ballad line, “I dare not dispose of mine owne as I would.” Around 1603, the widowed Alice Millington married a man named Edward Cleter, and immediately found herself in a situation unpleasantly similar to those of the ballad widows. As a witness testified in Alice’s eventual separation suit, on their wedding night “Edward Cleter shutt her the same Alice out of his chamber & would not suffer her to lye with him” (DL/C/218/329);23 the following day, when Alice “spake very kyndly & lovingly to him he willd her to stand awaye from him saying thinkst thou that I can love such a mustie rustie widdow as thou art thou hast a face that loketh like the back of a tode I married the[e] but to be mayntayned like a man and so I will be” (327). The early days of their marriage were marked by the escalation of Edward’s cruelty, including an episode where he “ralyd uppon her calling her whore & then took her by the haire of the head & wond it about his hand & beate her on the face w[i]th his other hand,” before he again demanded money. Alice told him that she had no more, pointing out that she had already pawned her ring for him; distressed by his threat that he would begin to pawn her household goods, she offered some of her apparel to that purpose instead. Edward was also, the witness reports, “very importunat w[i]th her for the lease of the howse & she told him it was out of her hands she had it nott & thereuppon he strucke her & misused her most cruelly” (328). At times, he lashed out at her property as well as her person, slashing the bedding and stabbing the kitchen pewter (325). Alice, however, did not tolerate this “misuse” in silence: from the very first incident, she denounced him to the neighbors in his presence, and by the December following their August wedding, she took out a warrant against him, whereupon “Cleter seing that submitted him selfe to his sayd wife & so they for that time became friends again” (325).

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As Alice did not sue for separation until January of 1608/9, after some five years had elapsed, and as all the reports of Edward’s abuse concern the first few months of the marriage, we may wonder whether Edward continued to “submit himself” to his older, wealthier wife for an extended period of time before growing violent again, or if the couple had physically separated long before Alice began legal proceedings. Although cruelty separation suits like Cleter contra Cleter reveal the horrors that abusive husbands could inflict on their wives, those involving remarried widows also reveal an assumption – at least on the part of witnesses – that the property a man acquires with a widow is still, in some sense, hers. In fact, when witnesses mention the “remarried widow” status of the wives involved in these cases, they typically do so in an economic context, as if it entitles her to rights that make the husband’s misuse of the household money or goods particularly heinous. The beatings and illtreatment that Margaret Farmer suffered at the hands of her husband John were exacerbated in the eyes of her neighbors by the fact that “John Farmer fownd . . . Margarett widowe when he married her verye well worthe by reporte a hundred pownde w[i]th her lease of her howse which said lease he this saide John havinge bynn married to her nott above a yeare or litle more pawnde or solde awaye” (DL/C/213/55). Nicolas Morley, a deponent for Elizabeth Carlile in her 1610 cruelty suit against her husband Henry, told the court how “Henry Carlile hath been a very ill husband one that taketh no course to lyve but spendes yt w[hi]ch his wife brought unto him she beinge a widow and wealthie before he marryed her” (DL/C/219/192v); the same formula is echoed in Mary Benson’s testimony that “the said Henry Carlile is a saylor by his trade but worketh little or not at all but liveth idly & hath spent and consumed his wife’s substance w[hi]ch she brought him, she being before a widow” (194r). The trouble between the Carliles seems to have begun when Henry returned from a long sea-voyage to find that his wife had reverted to “the name of a widow” and had set up a shop where she “solde semsters wares & tobacco & thryved very well” (193r; 195r). “Henry Carlile came home from sea & very poore,” explains Thomas Rogers, who had leased Elizabeth her shop, “& because he came home in that poore case she at the first was very loathe . . . to knowe he was her husband butt at the last he had some reliefe of her & went away againe to sea . . . or some other place” (193r). Evidently resenting his wife’s independent prosperity and her reluctance to share it with him, Henry returned a few months later and proceeded “in his fury [to] take his wifes wares out of her shop and sell them away before her face & carry away ye money w[i]th him” (192v); on other occasions, “when he could not get from her what he would,” he

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would call her whore and “beate her about the face that it was bruised and blacke” (195r; 194r). Until she filed the separation suit, Elizabeth’s only defence against her husband’s depradations was to “flee . . . from place to place” – and Henry realized this, reportedly declaring that “he would go to her if he could learne where she was & would take from her what he could get as often as he could get to her so longe as he lyved untill he were dyvorsed from her” (193r–193v). Henry’s defiance, however, comes across with the sense that even he recognized that he was preying on his wife’s property, not merely appropriating what was his own. While Henry Carlile’s perceptions of his marriage come down to us mediated through the testimony of others, the 1590 deposition of Christopher Percy provides a more direct account of the difficulties the husband of a remarried widow might face. It is easy to dismiss a man like Christopher as an abusive husband and therefore an untrustworthy narrator, and to formulate our own interpretation of his marriage from the testimony of his wife and her witnesses; to talk of a husband’s “difficulties” in the face of male domestic violence, not to mention the manifest legal inequities of early modern marriage, can seem absurd, if not downright traitorous. To listen to Christopher Percy, however, is not to suspend judgment, but merely to grant him the truth of his perceptions, or at the very least, to recognize that the story he told, even if disingenuous, was the one he believed would best win him a sympathetic hearing. Gowing aptly describes the Percy case as one in which the husband tried to force the widow he married “into obeying a vision of an ideally submissive wife” that was “particularly unlikely to fit a woman with her own inherited income and experience of independent life between marriages” (224–25). The suit, though, reveals more than an unsuccessful domestic tyrant. It gives us a portrait of a man anxiously aware of his marginal place in a widow’s established household. The accusations against Christopher are primarily economic: according to numerous witnesses, he convinced Margery Gare, a widow of six years’ duration with seven children from her former marriage, to marry him, even though by doing so she would give up the hundred marks a year that her late husband had left her (over and above a substantial inheritance) for the duration of her widowhood. Christopher won her over by promising a marriage even more prosperous than her present state, boasting “w[i]th many oathes that he mighte dispende in the Countrye where he dwelte Fyve hundred powndes a yeare & that he was worth besydes in goodes a thowsande pownds” (DL/C/213/711). He actually encouraged Margery

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to make the kind of pre-marital settlement that many second husbands dreaded, for as he continued, . . . itt was nott her wealth that he soughte for, but her p[er]s[o]n, & therefore yf she hadd any thinge he willed her to geve itt to whome she would he wold never enquire after itt, And that he wold hymself allowe her a hundred pownds a yeere or else a thousande pownds in mony, to geve to whome she lised yf he died before her, And yf she died before hym, he would suffer her to dispense of Fyve hundred pownds (w[hi]ch he would geve her) to whome she pleased, And more he saied he would geve to the p[ro]ducents three daughters att the day of their marriadges eche of them a hundred pownds And therefore willed her to take noe care for he had enoughe for them bothe or such like words to that effecte. (721)

The problem after the marriage was not that Christopher proved less wealthy than advertised, but that he would disappear for months at a stretch to his house in the country, leaving his wife at her house in Clerkenwell without “anie order . . . for provision of howse or other necessaries for her selfe her Children or famelye” so that the London household was “in very bare estate for p[ro]vision” (712). The Percy suit is mercifully free of blood and bruises, although Christopher evidently indulged in his share of threats and insults, the latter often directed at Margery’s age and fading sexual appeal: he reportedly would “as well before the face of the producent as behynde her bayke call her ould hagg old dry thinge, and that he could have as good as she for fower or fyve shillinges and therefore what cared he for her” (719). The main issue, though, in Margery’s words, was simply that “Christopher Percy departed from her,” after which “by her said husbands mysdemeanour & crewell and unkynde usage of her she neither hath nor hath hadd any mayntenance or allowance of the s[ai]d Mr Percye her husbande for or by the space of theys [illegible] moneths last past att the least” (647; 705). But where Margery tells a fairly straightforward story of abandonment and withholding of “mayntenance” – made particularly frustrating by the fact that she had bought this treatment at the cost of her hundred-mark annuity – Christopher sketches a power struggle between the widow’s household at Clerkenwell and his own estate in the country. Margery describes the Clerkenwell house as “the howse wherein she dwells and owt of w[hi]ch he married her, and in w[hi]ch he promised her at the tyme of their marriadge to cohabite w[i]th her” (647); if Christopher did make such a promise, he soon lost any intention of keeping it, for it appears that what he found in Clerkenwell was a long-established circle of friends, family, and allies among whom the former Widow Gare enjoyed a certain

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authority and he did not. Margery and her family, having lived in her house since before Gare’s death, had remained there during the six years of her widowhood (720), and Christopher, accustomed to an esteemed position in his own part of the country as “an Esqyere,” a former justice of the peace, and a sherriff (720), shows himself acutely aware of the limitations on his practical power as the supposed new head of the Gare household. There is a note of protest in his testimony that when one of the widow’s grown sons was “outrageously behavinge hymselfe” towards him, he “rebuked hym as he might lawfully doe in his owne howse, & being his father in lawe” (687); however, as he immediately proceeds to acknowledge, the widow’s house was not his own, not even legally, nor was he the master in it.24 As the clerk records in Christopher’s deposition, This r[espon]dent being on a tyme greviouslye abused by some yt favored her [Margery] att Clarkenwell saide yt he . . . did meane to have the s[ai]d margery being his wyfe to his owne howse in the Contrye where he might be m[aste]r of his owne howse, & nott be so abused by oth[er]s as there he was. (688)

Three months into the marriage, Christopher was desperate to get out of Clerkenwell and return to his own house, “to have the said margerye dwell therein with this r[espon]dente as man & wyfe ought to doe.” Margery, as aware as her husband of how power was tied to place, persisted in “obstinatlye refusinge” to go with him (688), for according to witnesses, Christopher had announced his plans to “locke her into a Chamber” (712) and to “tame” her (716) once he had her on his own territory. And so, in an attempt to force her hand, he this r[espon]dent (the rather to induce & provoke her to goe w[i]th hym into the Contry accordinge to his s[ai]d request) did forbyd the baker Brewer victualler, woodseller or Carter to delyver anie p[ro]vision w[i]thowtt ready money to or for the s[ai]d margerie, & this r[espon]dent did furth[er] saye, yt he would nott pay for any such p[ro]vision as they should delyver to or for the s[ai]d Margery w[i]thowtt ready money after the tyme he had so forebidden them. (687)

Christopher refused to assume any further financial responsibility in a house where he could not be master; Margery, for her part, evidently preferred autonomy at her own expense to submission at her new husband’s. He was left to admit that his plan to “induce & provoke her” had failed, for “margery contr[ar]y to her dewty & honesty hath ever since & yett doth remayne in the s[ai]d howse att her owne owne [sic] hande & hazarde” (688). As for his financial promises to her, including some “made . . . since the tyme of their marriage togither specified in

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a certeyne writinge,” Christopher maintained that he would fulfill them only after “the s[ai]d m[ar]gery & her frends delyver upp into ye hands of this r[espon]dente & to his use all such plate howsehold stuffe Jewels money rings statuts recognizances, obbligac[i]ons bills obligatory w[i]th oth[er] writings & goods w[hi]ch she ye s[ai]d margerie att the tyme of her s[ai]d marriadge w[i]th this r[esp]ondent had, or had right or interest to have, & the w[hi]ch this r[espon]dent by reason of the s[ai]d marriage w[i]th her hath interest unto” (688). Clearly, he recognized that his orders to the tradesmen, which he gave “expressely in hearinge . . . of the servants in the howse” (712), were a largely symbolic demonstration of what little power he had in the Clerkenwell household rather than an effective plan to starve his wife out of her house. Two could play at the game of withholding funds, and in the context of his deposition, Christopher’s reported threat – “gods swoundes ye whore I will make ye be glad to come to me & saye to me good Mr Percy geve me some breade for my Children” (717) – comes to savor less of unmotivated sadism than of frustration at his wife’s resistance to economic manipulation. How the case concluded is not known, but there is no suggestion that Margery ever set foot in Christopher’s country house, while he, for his part, asked a neighbor to “beare wittnes that he would never come in the howse of the p[ro]ducente while he lyved” (717). “The husband is, by the very institution of marriage, ordained to be the head; and the head was made to rule and governe the body. Now, the difficulty that is incident to this regiment, is such, and so great, that few men take pleasure in possessing it, none at all performe it in that manner they should” (sig. A7r–A7v). So writes the anonymous translator of A Discourse of the Married and Single Life (1621) in his “Preface to the Masculine Reader.” By the time that Christopher Percy ended up defending himself in court against charges of domestic negligence and cruelty, he had thoroughly proved the truth of this formula. For all his threats and manipulations, he had failed at his fundamental duty as a husband: First, he must keepe his authority, and maintaine himselfe in that place, wherein his Maker hath set him. Nature hath framed the lineaments of his body to superiority, & set the print of government in his face, which is more sterne, lesse delicate than the womans. He must not suffer this order of nature to be inverted . . . if he doe, that is a deformed family. (Whately, A Bride-Bush [1617], 18–19).

Male domestic government was supposedly decreed by God and Nature, but the amount of didactic ink expended on its maintenance reveals that it

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must have come anything but naturally to many men.25 Marrying a widow, a woman accustomed to being her own head and often financially entitled to continue so, added a sizeable extra dimension to the anxiety surrounding the already precarious obligation of a husband’s control over his wife and household. While the courts give us a glimpse of this anxiety in action, the theatres provide at least a fantasy of how it might be managed.

chapter 3

The suitor’s fantasy: courtship and compensation

All waies take this for a maxime, That old Widowes love young men, Oh then doe not spare for asking, Though she’s old, shele toot agen: she scornes to take for Ritches sake. Thy money she regardeth not, with love her winne, together joyne, And strike the Iron while tis hott. From a c.1625 ballad1

If there is a locus classicus of the lusty widow stereotype in early modern drama, a good candidate for the title would be Chapman’s 1604 comedy, The Widow’s Tears. This play about two widows – one genuine, the other the unsuspecting victim of a faked-death scheme – who succumb to the carnal temptations of remarriage appears to have enjoyed considerable popularity: it was produced in two theatres, Blackfriars and Whitefriars, was not published until seven years after its first performance (with a dedication noting that it was “of many desired to see printed”), and was played at Court even a year after its publication (Parrott, 797). Judging from most modern criticism, its enthusiastic reception would suggest that Jacobean audiences favored some particularly harsh condemnation of the desirous widow and her decision to take a second husband, for it is widely agreed that Chapman portrays both women as suffering morally reprehensible falls from an exalted ideal of widowed chastity.2 With the assumption in place that early modern English society disapproved of female remarriage, it is easy to see The Widow’s Tears as participating in the ideological work of dissuasion by representing a widow’s choice to remarry as motivated solely by the most bestial of urges. There is no doubt that Chapman’s two widows are motivated by lust. But what function – within the play, and within the 77

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culture – does that lust serve? The Widow’s Tears, as critics have suspected, does embody some of early modern English culture’s prevailing anxieties about the remarrying widow. What the play reveals, though, is not the lusty widow as dissuasive weapon, but the lusty widow as reassuring fantasy, a fantasy that, on the contrary, works to enable remarriage. The enabling fantasy of the lusty widow is not necessitated by a culture which seeks to maintain her celibacy. The English culture in which Chapman wrote, as I have argued, had little such interest; neither, for that matter, does the staged society of “Cyprus” in The Widow’s Tears. The play’s earlier critics, however, tend to assume that The Widow’s Tears endorses a cultural ideal of widowed chastity, while some later ones claim that it exposes the damaging effects this male-generated ideal has on the women who internalize it.3 But either interpretation is problematic, for the play in fact represents this “ideal” not as a pressure emanating from a male-dominated society, but as a tactic which women use in their own interests. It is twice mentioned that the Countess Eudora made vows of lifelong chastity to her husband before he died (1.1.86–89 and 2.4.21–35), but there is no indication here – as there is in More Dissemblers – that she did so at his urging. And although Eudora’s motivation remains murky, the impetus to vows of widowed chastity is strongly hinted at in the play’s second plot. Cynthia swears to her husband Lysander that she will never even contemplate remarriage, but far from being influenced by societal or family pressures, the promise is evidently her own initiative, with a hint of economic manipulation. As her brother-in-law Tharsalio puts it, Cynthia hath so possessed my brother’s heart with vows and disavowings, sealed with oaths, of second nuptials, as in that Confidence he hath invested her in all his state, the ancient inheritance of our family, and left my nephew and the rest to hang upon her pure devotion, so as he dead, and she matching (as I am resolved she will) with some young prodigal, what must ensue, but her post-issue beggared, and our house, already sinking, buried quick in ruin? (2.3.78–85)

Tharsalio – who has an uncanny habit of being right, no matter how unsavory other characters and certain critics may find him – presents vows of widowed chastity as a kind of female-designed conspiracy, from his first definition of them as a method for leading “blind husbands . . . by the noses” (1.1.104) to his deflating vision of Cynthia’s tomb as a shrine to chaste widowhood, where the worshipers are not men but other widows, offering “their wet muckenders [handkerchiefs] for monuments of the danger they have passsed” (4.1.124–25). If we are disinclined to listen to Tharsalio, or inclined to argue that any such tactic could only function in a society

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which placed great value on its underlying premise, we might listen instead to Lycus, the play’s undisputed voice of neutrality and reason: You know how strange his [Lysander’s] dotage ever was on his wife, taking special glory to have her love and loyalty to him so renowned abroad; to whom she oftentimes hath vowed constancy after life, till her own death had brought, forsooth, her widow-troth to bed. This he joyed in strangely, and was therein of infallible belief . . . (2.3.50–55)

In this play, nobody except the women and the gullible Lysander sings the praises of perpetual widowhood. And if it is decidedly “strange” for even a husband to take such pleasure in the prospect of it, a cultural bias against remarriage is hard to find. Rather than portraying a culture in which female remarriage is condemned, The Widow’s Tears opens with a situation that resonates with the view of the widow outlined in the previous chapters: a woman who is the object of both intense desire and considerable anxiety. Eudora is the epitome of the anxiety-provoking widow whose wealth, status, and independence threaten to subjugate any second husband. Despite the fact that Tharsalio, a member of a decayed noble family, boasts an aristocratic bloodline, his status in relation to “the rich and haughty Countess” (1.1.59–60) is determined by his poverty as a younger brother endowed only with “valour, and good clothes” (1.1.32). His former lowly position as a page in her household makes the Countess’s potential for marital mastery even more explicit. If Tharsalio is to win her – and if she is to be seen as a “jewel worth the wearing” (1.1.60–61), rather than a ticket to disaster like Mistris Foster in Rowley’s A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed (1615?), or Gwenthyan of Patient Grissil (1600) – he will first have to disarm her. Disarm her he does, and in the process he illuminates how the figure of the lusty widow functions as compensation for her suitor’s threatened masculinity: throughout his courtship of Eudora, Tharsalio systematically translates their relationship of superior and subordinate into terms of sexual desire, prowess, and satisfaction. The “Confidence” that Tharsalio invokes as his goddess at the start of the play is, quite simply, confidence in his own ability to arouse and satisfy the appetites which he is certain lurk behind Eudora’s vow of perpetual chastity; as he assures his skeptical brother and sister-in-law, “she has taken note of my spirit and surveyed my good parts, and the picture of them lives in her eye; which sleep, I know, cannot close, till she have embraced the substance” (1.1.75–78). From the beginning, he couches in sexual language the threat that her status poses to the gendered hierarchy of their projected marriage, asking Confidence to

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Later, having forced his way into Eudora’s presence, Tharsalio counters her determination to assume a master’s superiority by repeatedly shifting the terms of their debate to a purely sexual plane, as in the following exchange: e udor a: How now, base companion? t h ar sali o: Base, madam? He’s not base that fights as high as your lips. e udor a: And does that beseem my servant? t h ar sali o: Your court-servant, madam. e udor a: One that waited on my board? t h ar sali o : That was only a preparation to my weight on your bed, madam. (1.2.67–74)

When the widow asks him if she is “so scant of worthy suitors that may advance mine honour, advance my estate, strengthen my alliance (if I list to wed), that I must stoop to make my foot my head?” his response is again sexual: “No, but your side, to keep you warm a-bed” (2.4.164–68). To her insulting rebuff that marriage to him would be “stooping to my vassal,” he lewdly offers himself as “your drudge, madam, to do your drudgery” (2.4.162–63); when she calls him “sirrah” and threatens to have him “tossed in blankets,” he informs her that she should add her sheets and be the tosser herself (1.2.92). With a little help from the bawd Arsace, who brings Eudora a supposedly cautionary tale of his prodigious prowess as “the most incontinent and insatiate man of women that ever Venus blessed with the ability to please them” (2.2.75–77), Tharsalio ultimately triumphs over his rival suitor, the wealthy Spartan lord Rebus. Rebus promises the Countess all manner of honors and riches, and a kinship alliance with the Spartan Viceroy, but as he brings “no better ware than letters in’s packet” (2.4.8), he fails. Tharsalio promises her but one thing – sexual satisfaction – and wins. In effect, Tharsalio and Eudora provide an instructive model for how the fantasy of the widow’s sexual susceptibility can be deployed to contain the anxieties that the wealthy, marriageable widow could arouse. Faced with the paradoxical marital prospect which she offered – an arrangement that would “make a man” of the husband with regard to money and social

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status, yet could undermine his manhood with the threat of emasculating subjection to his wealthier, more experienced wife – men obtained the reassurance they needed to seize their economic opportunity through the construct of the lusty widow, which provided a kind of compensation against the threat to a second husband’s masculine domestic authority. The construct thus not only allowed impecunious men to imagine themselves as suitable candidates for the hand of a rich widow (for the lusty widow disregarded wealth in her search for pleasure),4 but, by seeing the widow as a creature driven by her sexual needs, and by seeing themselves as able to both arouse and satisfy those needs, men assuaged their anxiety over the match’s threat to certain facets of the masculine role (domestic authority, financial control) by focusing on and reinforcing another, more stable aspect of their masculinity – their physical virility. At first glance, this assertion may seem to contradict the widely accepted formulation that sexual relationships with women were in fact inimical to early modern masculinity. How could the sexualization of the widow bolster a suitor’s manhood in a culture where, as Stephen Orgel describes it, “[w]omen are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women renders men effeminate,” where “sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity”(26)? The accuracy of this reading cannot be faulted; it would be difficult, at any rate, to argue with the mass of evidence supporting it, from Burton’s assertion that love “turns a man into a woman,” to Romeo’s fear that his passion for Juliet has made him “effeminate.”5 I would argue, however, that the other side of this formulation, the opposite of the man who has been “unmanned” by sexual love for a woman, is not found in the celibate or asexual man who eschews heterosexual passion, nor exclusively in homoerotic relationships, but is instead manifested in the sexually potent man who has the ability to arouse and satisfy feminine desire at will, without being enslaved to it by his own longing.6 Anthony Fletcher observes that early modern men differentiated sexual conquest from the effeminate implications of romantic love, making “sexual prowess and performance” a significant test of manhood (93),7 but this intuitive (and arguably modern) distinction is complicated by the fact that in the early modern period, as Phyllis Rackin points out, even lust was gendered feminine and despised as a sign of weakness (74). I want to turn instead to Ian Frederick Moulton’s nuanced reading of the relations between male sexuality and effeminacy in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century erotic texts, which suggests that a man’s control of his own sexual desire and pleasure may be the pivotal issue in whether

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sexual activity validates or undermines his masculinity. Examining variant texts of Thomas Nashe’s erotic poem, “Choice of Valentines” (c. 1592), Moulton demonstrates how the poem originates as a narrative of male sexual anxiety, in which the protagonist is so overcome with desire for his mistress that he ejaculates prematurely – twice – and leaves her obliged to satisfy herself with a dildo, but in rewritings and memorial reconstructions in male readers’ manuscript collections becomes “a narrative of asssured masculine mastery” (191). The dildo, and the need for it, are excised, and “male sexual success . . . is measured both by the ability to defer and control ejaculation and by the bringing of pleasure to the female” (190). If, as Moulton argues, “sexual relations between men and women were conceived of as a ‘natural’ site for the demonstration of masculine mastery,” but the “effeminate pleasure” and physically weakening “spending” of the sex act were seen to endanger masculinity (28), then the ideal sexual relationship for proving masculinity would theoretically be one in which desire and pleasure were wholly confined to the female partner. Odd as this may sound, it is nonetheless precisely what the theatrical deployment of the lusty widow attempts to accomplish: while emphasizing the widow’s sexual need and her susceptibility to promises of pleasure, the plays deflect the suitor’s desire away from the widow’s attractions as a woman (however portrayed on the stage, these are almost always absent from the text), focusing it instead on her property. The suitor typically declares his desire for the widow’s money as forthrightly as he (and sometimes, she) declares her need for sexual satisfaction and his ability to provide it, figuring the relationship as an explicit sex-for-money exchange and finding rhetorical protection from the effeminating implications of male sexual desire and pleasure. Furthermore, since uncontrollable sexual passion was a mark of the feminine, dangerously demeaning when aroused in men, it follows that the lusty widow construct also assuaged male anxieties about the widow’s power by “feminizing” her, effectively cutting her down to size. The image of the rich widow at the mercy of her desires changed the relationship between the widow and her suitor from one of (female) benefactor and (male) humble recipient, with its implied threat to the gendered domestic hierarchy, to one which rendered the widow, for all her financial and social superiority, approachable, pliable, even mildly contemptible as her degrading feminine need for sex debased her below the suitor and his need for her money. The dynamic is similar to that which Katharine Hodgkin astutely observes in Thomas Whythorne’s dealings with the widowed gentlewoman he served. As Whythorne describes the situation,

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I, being loath that she should withdraw her good will from me, was very serviceable to please her; and also would sometimes be pleasant and merry, and also somewhat bold with her. After the which times, she would sometimes tell me in a scoffing manner that I was but a huddypick, and lacked audacity.8 But I, not construing those words so then, as they did proceed from one who did know her game, or else had learned that, as he that wooeth a maid must be brave in apparel and outward show, so he that wooeth a widow must not carry quick eels in his codpiece but show some proof that he is stiff before, did think her show of love and liberality bestowed upon me was but to feed her humour, and to bring her purpose to pass . . . That is to say, to bring me in such a doting love towards her, whereby I should suffer her to ride and deride me as she list. (33)

Looking back on his doubly vulnerable position – he is not only a dependent in the widow’s household, but the target of her efforts to bring him into an even more threatening kind of servitude – Whythorne turns defensively to the notion of a widow’s lust: “His proverb about widows counters her implicitly sexual mockery with an alternative version of worldly – and fleshly – wisdom, deriving from the contemporary stereotype of the lascivious widow: her invitation is the result of an inability to control her lusts, while he knows how to hold his in check. He must be potent, but master of his potency” (Hodgkin, 33). Where Whythorne cautiously denies any sexual impropriety, yet admits that he feigned love for the sake of “the commodity that I looked to get at her hands” (33, 43), the overt exchange of sexual pleasure for “commodity” in early modern widow-wooing plots allows the man to retain the upper hand. I do not mean to imply that individual suitors did this ideological work for themselves, much less that they were aware of the process that constructed the fantasy of the widow’s sexual susceptibility out of male anxieties. The stereotype and its deployment as an enabler of remarriage were made available to them by a culture with a material interest in the recirculation of the widow’s wealth back into the (male) economy. It was there in ballads like the one which introduces this chapter, with its lewd celebration of the widow as receptive metal, sexually “heated” by her previous husband; or in comic anecdotes like those of John Taylor’s A Juniper Lecture (1639), where a widow turns down an unsuitably ancient wooer and encourages young ones by declaring, “I will have a Husband that shall be alwayes provided like a Souldier, never not with standing, but in a Centinell posture, and with his Match lighted, and cocked bolt upright, and ready to do execution” (19). Even Overbury’s character of “An Ordinary Widdow” (1614), often taken as straight moral condemnation of remarriage, in fact combines conventional warnings about a widow’s penchant for premarital

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settlements with salacious advice on how to win her. After describing her desires with obvious delight in outrageous sexual wordplay, the character ends with a punning tip: A Churchman shee dare not venture upon; for she hath heard Widowes complaine of dilapidations: nor a Soldier, though he have Candle-rents in the Citie, for his estate may be subject to fire: very seldome a Lawyer, without hee shew his exceeding great practise, and can make her case the better: but a Knight with the old Rent may doe much, for a great comming in, is all in all with a Widow: ever provided, that most part of her Plate and Jewels, (before the wedding) lye concealde with her Scrivener. Thus like a too ripe Apple, she falles of her selfe: but hee that hath her, is Lord but of a filthy purchase, for the title is crackt. Lastly, while shee is a Widow observe ever, shee is no Morning woman: the evening a good fire and Sacke may make her listen to a Husband: and if ever shee bee made sure, ’tis upon a full stomacke to bedward. (71–72)

When the lusty widow fantasy is offered in the theatre by a play like The Widow’s Tears, the widow’s desire is constructed by the play itself, not by the fictional suitor, who need only perceive, correctly, that the widow “is” lustful. Tharsalio’s justified confidence in Eudora’s lust and in his own ability to satisfy her desires allows him to deflect the threat that even in marriage he would always remain a “servant” and a “vassal” to a woman so much his superior in status and wealth. At one point, he compares himself to Hercules, “that for love put on Omphale’s apron and sat spinning amongst her wenches, while his mistress wore his lion’s skin, and lamb-skinned him, if he did not his business” (2.4.185–88): invoking both male subjugation and immense virility, the image of Hercules articulates the widow’s threat while containing it within an assurance of male sexual power.9 As Orgel points out, however, explaining any particular dramatic depiction of women as a “male fantasy” is problematic, for “theatres are viable only insofar as they satisfy their audiences. The depictions must at the very least represent cultural fantasies, and women are implicated in them as well as men” (11). While Orgel later qualifies this statement by suggesting that the satisfactions of female playgoers had more to do with the social dimensions and the transvestite conventions of the theatre than with the texts of the plays performed there (77–82), a quest for the broader appeal of the lusty widow – a male fantasy, if there ever was one – turns up an interesting possibility. In more than one early modern comedy, the sexualization of the remarrying widow includes the sexualization of marriage, often to the point of eliding the fact that marriage is “about” anything but sex. If one side of the coin is that the promise of male sexual mastery compensates for the tenuousness of other facets of masculine domestic authority,

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the other side may be that a definition of marriage as a woman’s sexual satisfaction by a man has more potential appeal as a female fantasy than, say, the arguably more realistic view expressed by Middleton’s Isabella in Women Beware Women (1621), who complains that by marrying, women “do but buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions / To men to keep ’em in subjection” (1.2.172–73). The Widow’s Tears admits no such thing. Rather, responding to another of Eudora’s reminders that he was once her serving-man, Tharsalio agrees, Madam, I am still the same creature; and I will so tie my whole fortunes to that style as were it my happiness (as I know it will be) to mount into my lord’s succession, yet vow I never to assume other title, or state, than your servant’s: not approaching your board, but bidden; not pressing to your bed, but your pleasure shall be first known if you will command me any service. (2.4.248–54)

Describing himself as her “court-servant” (1.2.71) and her “drudge” (2.4.163), one who weights/waits on her bed instead of on her board, he implies that as her husband he will merely enjoy a lateral promotion from household servitude to sexual servitude. It is, in fact, hard to dismiss this language as merely a deliberate tactic to disarm the Countess. Even in soliloquy, Tharsalio expresses his own fantasies about inverting the roles of master and servant in sexual language (1.1.176–80); even when he boasts to others of his conquest – in a description on which the audience must rely in lieu of seeing the event for themselves – he uses such sustained double-entendre that his own profit is conflated with his new wife’s pleasure: I oped my counting-house, and took away These simple fragments of my treasury. “Husband,” my Countess cried, “take more, more yet;” Yet I, in haste, to pay in part my debt, And prove myself a husband of her store Kissed and came off, and this time took no more. ................................... Then were our honoured spousal rites performed, We made all short, and sweet, and close, and sure. (3.1.66–74)

Tharsalio is literally describing to Lysander and Cynthia how he afforded his luxurious new suit of clothes, but with bawdy quibbles on “oped,” “counting-house” (not to mention “Countess,” a pun which operates throughout the play), “debt,” and “came off,” as well as Eudora’s impassioned cry, the speech describes her pleasure in his sexual generosity at least as much as his satisfaction in being master of her funds. Unless it is

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translated into these thoroughly sexualized terms, nobody in the play ever voices the fact that marriage for a widow involves renewed subjection to a husband and loss of rights to her property. The female experience of marriage is defined purely and unequivocally as licensed sexual satisfaction: the widow who does not remarry simply “make[s] the noontide of her years the sunset of her pleasures” (3.1.167–68). Of course, The Widow’s Tears does not end with Tharsalio and Eudora’s marriage. What are we to make of Cynthia, whose graveyard “pleasures” after the apparent death of her husband are portrayed as utterly grotesque? Unless the two plots are wildly contradictory, the obvious degradation of Cynthia’s departure from widowed chastity would seem to cast a pall back upon Eudora’s courtship, seriously problematizing any attempt to read the widow’s lust as a wish-fulfillment fantasy that enables remarriage. The play seems to pull us in two directions at once: we are obviously meant to celebrate Tharsalio’s marital conquest of Eudora; we are just as obviously meant to be disgusted by Cynthia’s sexual antics in the tomb, where she follows the Widow of Ephesus in offering to desecrate her husband’s body for the sake of her new lover.10 But once we understand how the lusty widow functions in the first plot – which inevitably colors the audience’s view of the second – we can also see how Cynthia is satirized not for her eventual yielding to the soldier, but for her determination to remain a chaste widow in the first place. If the widow must be both desirous and accessible to suitors in order to allow a young man like Tharsalio to obtain the economic and social advantages he deserves, then Cynthia’s withdrawal into her husband’s tomb represents a dangerous challenge to the fantasy, for which the would-be un-lusty widow is duly, drastically punished. The Tharsalio/Eudora plot, in which the widow’s lust overcomes disparities in rank and wealth as well as a vow of celibacy, has proved that it is impossible for a woman whose appetite is “whetted with nuptial delights” (3.1.164) to forego sexual pleasure, and that remarriage is beneficial to both widow and suitor. In his own family, however, Tharsalio is faced with a brother enthralled by his wife’s dangerous, and possibly manipulative, valorization of widowed chastity. The speech, quoted earlier, in which he complains that Cynthia’s vows have persuaded Lysander to will her his entire estate (2.3.77–85) may reveal only part of Tharsalio’s motives for leading Lysander to suspect his wife (revenge for their teasing and an urge to unmask moral pretense also figure strongly in his behavior), but his own almost fatherly care to arrange a profitable marriage for his nephew indicates that this logical economic reason for testing Cynthia is not just an excuse to cloak baser intentions. His belief that it is wiser not to leave a

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child’s inheritance in a widow’s hands is echoed by the author of The Office of Christian Parents (1616), who advises a woman to protect her children, and her own peace in any second marriage, by encouraging her husband to make a will “allot[ting] every child his portion” (129). Tharsalio thus sets out to convince his brother that a widow’s lust makes her remarriage inevitable, and that testamentary precautions for one’s children are as necessary as vows and dissuasions are futile. In doing so, he raises a possibility that will be played out to ironic effect at the end of the play, adding the finishing touch to the fantasy of remarriage the play offers to its audience: rather than presenting perpetual widowhood as the natural evidence of wifely love, the play suggests that the two may be mutually exclusive. According to Cynthia and Lysander, a woman’s continued celibacy as a widow is the natural sequel to her love and loyalty to her husband, and perhaps even their proof.11 According to the reasonable Lycus, however, who considers it “strange” that Lysander should be so taken with the notion of chaste widowhood (2.3.50–55), the two modes of behavior are not necessarily inseparable. Not even Tharsalio, Lycus assures the uneasy husband, doubts that Cynthia is a model of wifely virtue, and he does not impugn her present fidelity when he questions her resistance to remarriage. It is possible, he implies, to question the latter without negating the former: Tharsalio cannot “misconceive / Her spotless love and loyalty” (2.1.68–69), but may nonetheless refuse to believe that “you being dead, no man might stir a spark / of virtuous love, in way of second bonds” (2.1.71–72). Even Lycus himself, who believes whole-heartedly in Cynthia’s virtue, is not quite as confident as Lysander on the point of perpetual widowhood (2.1.78–79). Later on, after Lysander has faked his death and Cynthia has shut herself up in the tomb, the suggestion that remarriage does not negate the love a wife had for her husband during his life is taken a step further. Tharsalio’s cynical remark that Cynthia seeks to be “deified” for her excessive mourning provokes the following exchange: lyc u s: I for my part will say that if her faith be as constant as her love is hearty and unaffected, her virtues may justly challenge a deity to enshrine them. t h a r s a l i o: Ay, there’s another point, too. But one of those virtues is enough at once. All natures are not capable of all gifts. (4.1.127–32)

These lines have received scant critical comment, but they do much to illuminate the play’s attitude towards remarriage.12 The virtues in question are “faith” – in this context widowed constancy – and “hearty and unaffected” love for the man who has died. By observing that either widowed “faith” or

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married love is “enough at once,” and that a woman’s capacity for one may preclude her capacity for the other, Tharsalio logically and pragmatically implies that the woman who truly loved her husband and was happy as a wife (and by extension, was sexually faithful) would reasonably wish to resume this happy state after his death. The notion that a widow’s celibacy shows her love for her late husband is turned on its head, and instead, it is the remarrying widow who proves herself to have been the truly loving wife. Cynthia, however, chooses to ignore her “nature” and to indulge her pride, fasting and mourning in her husband’s tomb to enhance her reputation for virtue. “This strain of mourning wi’th’ sepulchre,” scoffs Tharsalio, “like an overdoing actor, affects grossly, and is indeed so far forced from the life, that it bewrays itself to be altogether artificial” (4.1.105–08). Lycus rebukes him for his cynicism, but the cynic is right: Cynthia herself calls her excessive mourning “compliments [that] might have their time for fashion sake” (5.2.27–28), observing that “The praise I have had, I would continue” (4.3.80). Readers have been quick to blame Tharsalio and Lysander for testing Cynthia with unreasonable cruelty, but they tend to gloss over the fact that Cynthia’s method of making a spectacle of her mourning is her own calculated plan, and certainly not part of Tharsalio’s agenda.13 It has equally little to do with restrictive “societal expectations.” Starving oneself to death in one’s husband’s tomb is not the approved custom of Cyprus for mourning widows – it is “unexpected” and “extraordinary” (4.1.6–7). What Tharsalio had in mind for Cynthia when he and Lysander planned the test was a comfortable, conventional widowhood along the lines of Eudora’s, where he would “come to visit the distressed widow, apply old ends of comfort to her grief,” bringing her “choice of suitors” and counseling her “to take a living comfort that might ferret out the thought of her dead husband” (3.1.217–21). Had Cynthia simply behaved as a widow customarily does, she may or may not have resisted her suitors, but she would have earned herself far less condemnation. For while the revelation of Eudora’s desirousness merely affords the audience some salacious amusement at her expense, Cynthia’s appetites lead to her genuine moral degradation. Eudora takes a husband, but Cynthia is shown to be capable of fornicating in her husband’s tomb with her husband’s murderer, and of desecrating his body to defend her lover. The magnitude of Cynthia’s degradation is in direct proportion to her resistance to the prospect of remarriage. Eudora, whatever her private resolutions, heeds “a certain itch in female blood . . . to be sued to” (1.2.11– 12) and makes herself accessible to suitors. Cynthia, however, plans to take

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herself completely out of the marriage market in the most irreversible way possible, through her suicide. And with poetic justice, the very action that defines Cynthia’s resolve to be self-interestedly chaste – her descent into the tomb – works to bring about her sexual humiliation. In the context of Eudora’s story, Cynthia’s behavior with the “soldier” is both further evidence that all widows are sexually susceptible and easily won, and her punishment for attempting to deny men the right to exploit those sexual appetites in their interests. Perhaps the greatest irony of the situation is that at the same time as the play punishes Cynthia for her presumption of chastity, it reveals the truth of Tharsalio’s belief that “all natures are not capable of all gifts” and that wifely love does not equate to widowed chastity. For in loving the soldier, Cynthia demonstrates how dearly and constantly, even selflessly, she loves her “husband,” whomever he may be at the time.14 She is now willing to sacrifice the reputation she once valued above her life so that the man she believes to be her new husband may “enjoy the honour of [his] fortune in public, sit in Lysander’s chair, reign in his wealth” (5.2.10–11). As she offers up the “corpse” for crucifixion with the words “I have a body here which once I loved / And honoured above all; but that time’s past” (5.3.16–17), she implies that her love and honor are now due with equal devotion to the soldier. Cynthia’s faithful love is even visible when she refuses (as is her wifely right) to give evidence against her new “husband’s” crime, declaring “Would I had never seen thee, or heard sooner / This bloody story; yet see, note my truth, / Yet I must love thee” (5.3.34–36). While Lysander hears only the hideous irony of his wife describing as love and truth the very acts which prove to him her faithlessness, the audience may realize that Cynthia is proving exactly what Lysander wanted her to prove (that she is a loving, loyal wife) in precisely the opposite way from which he wished her to prove it. The mixture of degrading lust and genuine devotion that Cynthia displays in the tomb ironically reveals that a widow’s remarriage is not only inevitable but desirable – perhaps even from the husband’s point of view. Apart from Chapman’s revision of it for pro-remarriage early modern London, the Widow of Ephesus tale does not, to my knowledge, appear again in the theatre of the period. The typical widow-story told there was not the narrative of bereavement, grief, and too-easy consolation that worked to taint the widow’s sexuality with a sense of betrayal. Audiences were evidently more interested in live suitors than in dead busbands, for the basic elements of Tharsalio’s courtship of Eudora established a secure foothold on the comic stage: the widow, with her easily stirred sexual proclivities,

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suitably distanced from her husband’s demise; the successful suitor’s youth, poverty, physical prowess, and audacity; his rival or rivals, who are typically richer, often older, sometimes impotent; the widow’s threatening tendency to recognize that she is her suitor’s superior (his mistress, his benefactor, or merely a woman older, wiser, richer, and more esteemed than him); and the suitor’s successful defusing of that threat by reducing the widow to her sexual appetite. The coalescence of these elements in widow-wooing plots throughout the period – including Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1614), Barry’s Ram Alley (1608), Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), and Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611)15 – provides further evidence that a cultural fantasy of the widow’s lust functioned as compensation for threatened masculinity. The meaning of masculinity itself takes center stage in Wit Without Money. While in The Widow’s Tears the mistress/servant relationship between Eudora and Tharsalio makes the remarrying widow’s potential for marital dominance particularly explicit, the preoccupation with “manliness” which pervades Fletcher’s comedy illuminates the role that sexual virility plays in deflecting the widow’s threat. When Wit Without Money opens, a young gentleman named Vallentine has willfully divested himself of his inherited wealth, mortgaged his lands, and dedicated himself to the purely homosocial pleasures of bachelorhood, which for him involve living off the bounty of other men who appreciate him as a companion for his “understanding / . . . travell, reading, wit, all these digested” (1.1.182–3). His principles a mixture of socialism and sponging, Vallentine believes the world is “all a common riches, all men bound / To be his Bailiffes” (1.1.10– 11), and evidently has found enough like-minded men to sustain him in a kind of bachelor utopia, based on what he describes as the way of nature A manly love, community to all That are deservers, not examining How much, or whats done for them. (1.1.189–92)

In case the audience is tempted to join Vallentine’s concerned uncle and disgruntled tenants in their condemnation of his philosophy, his attractive younger brother – who has in fact suffered the most from this willful impoverishment – gives assurance that Vallentine is “Fraughted as deepe with noble and brave parts, / The issues of a noble and manly spirit / As any he alive” (1.2.60–62).

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Vallentine defines “manliness” in direct opposition to conventional domestic markers of adult manhood: he scorns the traditional male responsibilities of householding, exemplified by his late father who “kept good meate, good drinke, good fellowes, / Good hawkes, good hounds, and bid his neighbours welcome” (1.1.69–70); as his uncle complains, Vallentine would have housekeeping expenses “vented / Into more manly uses, Wit and carriage” (1.1.18–19). As for marriage, he avowedly prefers masculine company: Why tis a monstrous thing to marry at all, Especially as now tis made; me thinkes a man, An understanding man, is more wife to me, And of a nobler tie, than all these trinkets; What doe we get by women, but our senses, Which is the rankest part about us, satisfied, And when that’s done what are we? Crest falne cowards. What benefite can children be, but charges And disobedience? (2.2.45–53)

Judging from his hypothetical description of an ideal wife – a model of selfabnegation, “all her ends / Obedience, all her houres new blessings” (1.1.242– 43) – Vallentine’s rejection of marriage and householding as less “manly” than bachelorhood may also have something to do with the challenge that domestic government, and the inevitable “disobedience” of the governed, inherently poses to masculine authority. His views on women thus resemble the kind of anti-patriarchal misogyny that Purkiss observes in Swetnam’s The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615), where marriage is portrayed as male disempowerment, while the “Crest falne cowards” that Vallentine sees emerging limply from the marital bed bear witness to the early modern male anxiety that the sensual satisfaction of one’s “rankest part” with a woman is effeminating. Whereas the demands of marriage unmake a man, he terms his advisor/companion relationships with other bachelors as “My daily making men” (1.1.184), and sees his maintenance by them as blissful reciprocity: No man that I am allyed too, in my living, But makes it equal, whether his own use, Or my necessity pull first, nor is this forc’d, But the meere quallity and poysure of goodnesse. (1.1.176–79)

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It is not surprising then, that Vallentine ridicules his three friends as “polliticke fooles” when he hears they have become suitors to the rich widow Lady Hartwell. Aware that marriage to a widow is about as far as one can get from the equal “poysure” of homosocial ties, he vividly describes such a marriage as a financial and sexual threat to the husband: It is to wed a widdow, to be doubted mainely, Whether the state you have be yours or no, Or those old bootes you ride in. Mark me, widdowes Are long extents in Law upon mens livings Upon their bodies winding-sheetes, they that enjoy um, Lie but with dead mens monuments, and beget Onely their owne ill Epitaphs: Is not this plaine now? (2.2.26–32)

He advises them instead to find a maid who will be “With one man satisfied, with one raine guided, / With one faith, one content, one bed agreed” (2.2.97–98). He alone, he declares, could have an “equall venture” with a widow because he has nothing to lose, no money she can “law nor claw away,” and so he could contemptuously “laugh at her tears, neglect her angers, / Heare her without a faith” (2.2.74, 78–79). As Lady Hartwell has denied her suitors access to her for a month, Vallentine offers to “discover” her and to report back to them (for the fee of his maintenance) what kind of woman she is. His motives in doing so remain obscure – is it merely a paid service, as he claims, or a plan to woo her himself? – but whatever his intent, his approach to the widow wins him a wife. While, as Sandra Clark points out, the play shows Lady Hartwell to be more attractive than the amalgamation of “dubiously second-hand” riches and a “well-used” body suggested by the “old bootes” image of a widow (141), she proves nonetheless to be uncomfortably close to the kind of experienced, controlling woman about whom Vallentine warns his friends. She is imperious with her servants, dismissive of her suitors. As Vallentine’s uncle puts it, “a great Fortune has made her Mistresse / Of a full meanes, and well she knowes to use it” (1.1.44–45). The widow’s maid says her mistress is “old” (1.2.16), and her own sister describes her as “A woman of a presence” (1.2.11) who is “A subtill Chimicke wench, and can extract / The spirit of mens estates” (1.2.23–24). As the widow’s first appearance is in a scene where she angrily denounces her sister Isabella’s romance with Vallentine’s impoverished brother – “Ile stoppe her heate,” she declares, “And turne her charitie another way, / To blesse her selfe first” (2.1.24–26) – the others’ estimates of her are not unjustified. She is in fact preparing to

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move her entire household out of town to tear Isabella away from her lover when Vallentine accosts her with a barrage of misogynist insults with which he means to test her for pride and peevishness. Lady Hartwell is unperturbed by his accusations that she is “place proud,” for she simply believes she has every right to be so: If it be our owne, Why are we set here with distinction else, Degrees, and orders given us? In you men, Tis held a coolenesse if you lose your right, Affronts and losse of honour: ................................... . . . are we so much below you, That till you have us, are the toppes of nature, To be accounted drones, without a difference? (3.2.67–77)

As long as Vallentine accuses her of snobbery and vanity, Lady Hartwell eloquently defends herself and her sex on the basis that men are at least as guilty of those charges as women. But when he shifts to charges of lust, the oblique appeal to the widow’s sexual appetite works to lower this stately, prudent woman into the young prodigal’s grasp. He informs her that there are rumors abroad that she is “monstrous . . . Most strangely . . . Infinitly lustfull, / Without all bounds;” that she killed her husband with her insatiability; and that she is now buying dispensations to have not one but four new husbands, “Stucke in foure quarters like foure winds to coole you” (3.2.164–72). Vallentine apparently intends only to provoke her anger, but succeeds in arousing her amusement – and her desire – instead. She is evidently stirred by the image of herself with four men, and by his lewd commendations of her as “as good a woman / As any Lord of them all can lay his legge over” (3.2.179–80), a woman who can “shew / Men how to tread, and women how to follow” (3.2.185–86). For after he reveals that he has been testing her, she admits to herself that she is attracted to his “manly” nature: As I live a fine fellow, This manly handsome bluntness, shewes him honest; What is he, or from whence? blesse me, foure husbands! (3.2.194–96)

The widow’s desire for Vallentine is increased by another encounter with him, where he rids her of her unwanted suitors and advises her to control her lust with fasting and labor; it is fanned again when his uncle, hoping

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to effect a match, brings her titillating rumors that Vallentine has married her, “bestirred himselfe fairely” (5.1.67), and got her with child. Feeling an “itch” (5.1.82), she heads off to make the young man hers. Vallentine thus finds himself confronted with the opportunity to enter a marriage that holds a most ambivalent promise of wealth, status, and happiness: the widow who would redeem his mortgaged lands, but with whom “It is . . . to be doubted mainely / Whether the state you have be yours or no;” an independent, experienced woman who is the antithesis of his proposed ideal wife. But by the play’s final scenes, another factor has come to dominate the portrait of the widow and her relationship with Vallentine: her uncontrollable desire for him, and his ability to satisfy it. Although when she shows up in his chamber, she appears to be claiming the masculine role of pursuer and seducer – “Shee will not ravish mee?” the startled man exclaims, “By this light shee lookes as sharpe set as a Sparrow hawke” (5.4.12– 13) – her sexual need proves to be a source of vulnerability, not power. The widow, who seeks him out on the pretext that she is outraged at the rumors of their marriage, touches on the discrepancy between his status and hers when she remarks that he would marry her to be his “Nurse,” “hourely troubled . . . With swadling and with stitching up your ruines” (5.4.42– 44). The metaphor of nurse and patient neatly captures the potentially threatening dynamic of such a marriage: the officially servile nurse/wife who by her intimate medical/financial ministrations in fact exercises humiliating power over her disabled male charge. But Vallentine picks up her image, takes it to a nadir of domestic power inversion – the widow not as a sicknurse, but as a wet-nurse, himself emasculated back to infancy – and then turns it back on her in a display of sexual aggression: “my Nurse, yes, you shall rocke me: / Widdow Ile keepe you waking” (5.4.49–50). The marriage proposal he then delivers is phrased as his enforcement of her sexual obedience: But tis in anger yet, and I will marry thee, Doe not crosse me; yes, and I will lie with thee, And get a whole bundle of babies, and I will kisse thee, Stand still and kisse me hansomely, but do not provoke me, Stirre neither hand nor foote, for I am dangerous, I drunk sacke yesternight, do not allure me: Thou art no widdow of this world, come In pitty and in spite Ile marry thee, Not a word more, and I may be brought to love thee. (5.4.66–74)

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Lady Hartwell speaks not a word more, and the next scene finds her led off to church in view of the full cast of characters, subdued and a little shamed by Vallentine’s loud assertions of how he will sexually handle her: valle n t i ne : Nay you shall know I am a man. wi ddow: I thinke so. valle n t i ne : And such proofe you shall have – widdow : I pray speake softly. valle nt i ne : Ile speake it out Widdow, yes and you shall confesse too, I am no nurse child, I went for a man, a good one, If you can beate me out oth’ pit – widdow : I did but jest with you. valle nt i ne : Ile handle you in earnest, and so handle you: Nay when my credit cals — (5.5.21–28)

The meaning of being a “man,” defined at the beginning of the play in terms of wit, knowledge, reciprocal male friendships and a bachelor’s freedom, shifts until it is based entirely on sexual virility. Marriage, too, becomes wholly sexualized: the need to handle a complex, anxiety-provoking web of economic and emotional exchanges, acknowledged in the second act, is now elided by a man’s ability to “handle” his wife in bed. The marriage, notably, is portrayed as a transaction in which she – not he – will have her “rankest part” satisfied; his desires lie elsewhere, as the audience is reminded when Vallentine instructs his tenant to bear the mortgage of his lands triumphantly before them as they exit the stage to be married. Once the lusty widow is revealed within the proud lady, Vallentine can safely venture from the defensive security of bachelor masculinity to the full prosperity of manhood. Lady Hartwell’s unexpected visit to Vallentine’s chamber and his remark that she might “ravish” him are probably a Fletcherian wink at three slightly earlier comedies which show a rich widow won when her suitor barges into her bedroom with precisely that intent. Ram Alley, Greene’s Tu Quoque, and Amends for Ladies do not stop at the verbal sexual aggression which stirs Lady Hartwell in Wit Without Money and Eudora in The Widow’s Tears. These suitors accompany their invitations and innuendo with physically aggressive attempts at seduction, resulting in a foregrounding of sexual masculinity so as to make its compensatory role yet more evident. The three plays are significantly different in tone: the amoral Ram Alley, produced for the coterie audience of the Blackfriars’ Boys, is bawdy to the point of obscenity; Tu Quoque’s widow-plot gave the citizen audiences at the Red

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Bull a moralized version of the prodigal son story; and Amends avowedly caters to the tastes of female playgoers. That each capitalizes on the “bedroom invasion” pattern suggests that it had considerable appeal to Jacobean audiences. In Ram Alley, the Widow Taffata’s lustfulness is established from her first appearance, where she and her maid pass the time admiring “propper men and gallants” from their window (219–20): Taffata yearns for “a good legge worne in a long silk stocking, / With a long cod-peece” to come back into fashion (220–21), and describes how “a witty woman” distinguishes men by their “noses” (she is partial to the Tuscan nose, which is “lovely, large and brawde”) (232–34). Spotting a likely looking young man, Taffata drops her handkerchief out the window and reels in the first of her suitors, Boutcher. Boutcher, however, has been warned by a fortune-teller that marriage to a widow would “indanger” him (368), and while Taffata is initially enticed by his reticence, his wavering and lack of decisive action allow a rival to carry her off. For Boutcher, though, this is no real loss, as he is being followed by a disguised maiden, Constantia Somerfield, who happens to be an heiress as well. Even his friend and successful rival for Taffata, William Smalshankes, knows that a rich virgin is a better catch than a rich widow, and that anyone so lucky as to have the choice should have no trouble deciding: Why thou dejected taile of a Crab, Does not the faire Constantia Somerfield Doate on thy filthy face; and wilt thou wed A wanton widdow? what canst thou see To doate on her [?] (1890–94)

When Constantia reveals her true identity at the end, Boutcher is well provided for. Taffata’s second suitor is Sir Oliver Smalshankes, William’s father. The old knight is, of course, portrayed as sexually inadequate: his first words of courtship to the widow are “Widdow I must be short,” prompting another character to chide him “Will you shame your selfe, ha? You must be short, / Why what a word was that to tell a widdow?” (1190–92). Short as he may be, the old man offers Taffata a title, the society of the court, a five hundred pound jointure, and rich gifts of plate and jewels. The widow considers him, but only because he can be made to submit entirely to her will and to her plans to cuckold him: he agrees to let her have her own chamber to receive “visitants” in, to buy her a new coach specially designed to prevent

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the coachman from overhearing the occupants, and to obey her orders as to when he may “presume unto [her] bed” (1227). Eventually she agrees to marry him because she has “a kind of itching, / To be a lady” (1564– 65). Her “itching,” however, is no frivolous taste for titles, but a calculated move to keep a firmer hand on her money: “I have some debts at court, and marrying you, / I hope the Courtier will not sticke to pay me” (1568–69). A marriage to Sir Oliver promises not only wealth but, more importantly for her, independence, power, and control. Such promises are what William Smalshankes is up against when he schemes to win the widow away from his old father. The widow, William notes, “Has substance both in bretch and purse” (1698), and the old man needs the latter no more than he can use the former: . . . pitty and sinne it were she should be wed To a furd cloacke and a night-cap. Ile have her, This widdow I will have: her money Shall pay my debts and set me up againe, Tis heere, tis almost forg’d, which if it take The world shall praise my wit, admire my fate. (1699–1704)

As in Wit Without Money, the suitor’s avowedly mercenary desires predicate a relationship without the effeminating connotations of male lust: “having” the widow will leave him, so to speak, financially erect, “set . . . up againe.” Lust and its weaknesses are all on the female side: sexual aggression and explicit promises of sexual satisfaction are William’s only tactics to win the widow, and they are enough to make her give up a marriage in which she would be master. William plays on Taffata’s appetites until she is his, betrothed and safely bedded before the wedding. He begins by informing her in graphic detail of his father’s physical repulsiveness and impotence – “if you wed the stinckerd, / You shall find the tale of Tantalus / To be noe fable widdow” (1671–73) – while advertising his own youthful abilities at “pricke song” (1616). His father overhears this exchange and, understandably enraged, kicks his son out of the house, but William returns at night to accost the widow when she is undressed in her bedroom. Although she resists him at first, the very words she uses to do so reveal her lasciviousness and prove her refusal to be a kind of assent. When William kneels to sue to her, hinting lewdly that “Some wantons do delight to see men creepe, / And on their knees to woe them,” she responds:

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy I am none of those, Stand up, I more desire a man should stand, Than cringe and creepe that meanes to winne my love . . . (2169–72)

In a display of pure sexual aggression, William then produces the stageproperty equivalent of the erection she demands – a naked sword – and holds it to her throat, forcing her to kiss him and to listen as he explains how the match benefits both of them: he is in desperate need of money, and she, “a widdow that has knowne the quid of things” (2212), is in equal need to be saved from marriage with an old man who “Hath not a member to his palsie body, / But is more limber then a Kings head pudding, / Tooke from the pot halfe sod” (2216–18). The match is envisaged as a mutually profitable exchange of her money for his sexual service: Have you not wealth enough, to serve us both? And am I not a pritty handsome fellow, To doe your drudgery [?] (2219–21)

He threatens to kill her if she rejects his proposal, but the play is careful to show that Taffata is won by desire, not fear. Through all his swordplay, the widow raises only one objection: William is known to keep a whore. When he assures her that the girl has been discarded (and, by implication, that she as his wife will receive her full quota of satisfaction), she agrees to marry him. He insists on bedding her that very night, eliciting the widow’s unequivocal approval of his violent wooing: Ile love thee while I live, For this attempt give me that lusty lad, That winnes his widdow with his well drawne blade, And not with oaths and words: a widdows woing Not in bare words but should consist in doing, I take thee to my husband. (2247–52)

Given William’s own unabashed desire for Taffata’s money, it may seem a little unfair that his friend Boutcher should justify the match to the angry, cheated old father by telling him “You could not love the widdow but her wealth” (2468). Boutcher is quite right, though, for in the context of the play, to “love” the widow is to sexually satisfy the widow. Responding to the commonplace remark that “the soule once gon / The best part of a man is gone,” Taffata agrees,

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And ifaith If the best part of a man be once gone, The rest of the body is not worth a rush, Though it be nere so handsome. (2477–80)

For Taffata, the soul is superseded by the penis, the love that comes from the heart by the loving that comes from the groin. Given her criteria, who can object that the most mercenary young suitor, if he be virile enough, marries his widow only for money and not for love? As Alan Berman points out, the widow-wooing scene in Greene’s Tu Quoque is an adaptation of William’s sword-wielding seduction of Taffata in Ram Alley, but softened and sentimentalized for the citizen playgoers at the Red Bull (x–xix), who would have looked askance at what Andrew Gurr describes as the “cynical depiction of ‘gallant’ male sexuality” (354) appreciated by the more upmarket and sophisticated Blackfriars Boys’ audience. This “softening,” though, consists of only two significant changes – Tu Quoque’s Spendall, unlike Ram Alley’s William, does not enter into distasteful sexual competition with his own father, and Widow Raysby, unlike Taffata, insists on marriage before consummation. The spectacle of a young man using a weapon and explicit sexual promises to threaten and cajole a widow into submission was evidently quite acceptable to those supposedly less “cynical” citizen tastes. Spendall is the picture of a lovable young prodigal. As the play opens, his newly knighted master, Sir Lionel Rash, makes him master of his mercer’s shop, which Spendall quickly runs into the ground with debts. Spendall’s debts, however, are the result of what Berman describes as his “immoderate, indiscriminate generosity” (xiv): he showers money on everyone from his whore to the little tennis-court boy who blesses him for his handsome tips. Thrown into debtors’ prison, this good-hearted fellow quickly and sincerely repents his folly, and is rewarded by the news that his debts have been paid by the “Charitie” of the “able, and wel-minded Widdow Raysby” (2168–70). Spendall, freed from prison, goes off to thank her. The widow, whom the audience meets for the first time in the next scene, is about to marry Sir Lionel. As with Taffata’s prospective marriage to Sir Oliver, there is a suggestion that Sir Lionel is prepared to let his new wife have her own way: “for what is mine, is yours: you may command / Heere as at home, and be as soone obayde” (2299–300). But the Widow Raysby does not seem willful and, more unusually, she is not portrayed as lustful. There

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are no bawdy double-entendres in her speech, and she accepts Spendall’s thanks with some sage advice to live within his means and without any hint of sexual attraction. The audience is thus quite unprepared for Spendall’s response. Upset that his old friends are shunning him in his poverty, he convinces himself in soliloquy that the rich widow longs for him: It was an argument of love in her To fetch mee out of Prison, and this night, She claspt my hand in hers, as who should say, Thou art my Purchase, and I hold thee thus: The worst is but repulse, if I attempt it: I am resolved, my Geneus whispers to mee Goe on and win her, thou art young and active: Which she is apt to catch at, for there’s nought That’s more unsteadfast, then a woman’s thought. (2470–78)

Spendall thus refuses to see himself as an object of charity, finding it more soothing to his poverty-wounded pride to consider himself “purchased” with her gift as an advance payment for services he knows he can perform. Essentially, he reverses the relative status of their positions: from a magnanimous superior, the widow is reduced to a mere woman of “unsteadfast” sexual desires, while he becomes defined by what he does have and she wants – youth and vigor – rather than by what he lacks. That night, as the widow is reading in her chamber at Sir Lionel’s house, Spendall bursts into her room, declares his love to her, and tries to kiss her. Astonished, the widow responds by reminding him that he owes her respect as his benefactor, and that she has the power to reduce him to his former desperate state: Why thou impudent fellow, unthrift of shame, As well as of thy purse; What has moved thee To prosecute thy ruine? hath my bountie, For which thy Maister was an orator Importuned thee to pay mee with abuse? Sirra retire, or I will to your shame, With clamors rayse the house, and make your Maister For this attempt, returne you to the Dungion From whence you came. (2513–21)

As soon as the widow assumes that her “bountie” to him entitles her to a position of superior power (the same position she could well assume were

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she to marry him), Spendall’s whole demeanor changes. From being “soft and courtious, full of love” (2506), he becomes violent and sexually explicit, threatening her with his phallic dagger, which he refers to as his “naked weapon” (2572, 2582), forcing kisses from her, and spelling out the desired exchange of her wealth for his sexual performance in no uncertain terms. He begins, significantly, with an image that repudiates her scorn of him as a needy spendthrift by implying that she is the needy one, a beggar with a “clapdish” (Lucio’s vaginal pun on this word in Measure for Measure surely applies): Widdow, hold your Clapdish, fasten your Tongue Unto your Roofe, and do not dare to call, But give mee audience, with feare and silence; Come kisse mee: No? This Dagger has a poynt, doe you see it? And be unto my suite obedient, Or you shall feele it too. (2522–28)

Demanding her obedience, her “feare and silence,” he presents himself as a man “That has both youth and livelihood upon him; / And can at midnight quicken and refresh / Pleasures decayed in you” (2538–40). When her maid knocks at the door, he forces the widow to send her away, relishing the power he now has over her: “Very well, why now I see / Thou’lt proove an obedient wife: come, let’s undresse” (2570–71). Widow Raysby refuses to undress but, Taffata-like, she declares herself won over by his sexual aggression: By all my hopes I love thee, thou art worthy Of the best widdow living: thou tak’st the course; And those that will win widdowes must doe thus. (2578–80)

In lieu of immediate consummation, she agrees to sign a marriage contract. Then, for a few moments, it appears that Spendall may not have known the way to win a widow after all. Asking for assurance that he will be sexually faithful, Widow Raysby says that she will bind him to his word, and proceeds instead to bind him to a bedpost, display her riches before him, and tear up the contract, claiming that he would only use her wealth to “revell with amongst your Curtizans” (2630). However, it quickly proves to be all a test, and a very easy one at that: when Spendall refuses to curse her (by which he would gain nothing anyway), she joyfully announces:

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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy Take me unto thee, these, and all that’s mine; Were it thrice trebled, thou wert worthy all: And doe not blame this triall, cause it shews I give my selfe unto thee, am not forc’d And with’t a love, that ne’r shall be divorc’d. (2643–47)

Evidently, the proposed “exchange” has proved as tempting as the young suitor had hoped. Spendall now claims that he never meant to use the dagger, renews his promise of sexual fidelity, and the widow leads him off to church. Once again, it is proved that “those who will win widdowes must doe thus,” and even her feigned objection to him is based in the widow’s conventional desire to monopolize her new husband’s sexual attentions, so as not to disturb the fantasy with even a hint that she does not desire him or that his audacity is offensive. Even the most truly virtuous and seemingly non-lustful widow is thus shown to be accessible to a sexually potent young man, and his ability to play on her desires transforms his position from a humble recipient of her bounty to a man whose sexual generosity is worth “thrice treble” of what she can offer. Like Tu Quoque’s Widow Raysby, Lady Bright in Amends for Ladies is a widow whose virtue is shown to be quite compatible with her sexual susceptibility. With its title marketing the play as Field’s restitution to his female audience after his earlier offering, A Woman is a Weathercock (1609), Amends for Ladies presents a trio of attractive women, each of whom represents the ideal of one of the three female estates: maid, wife, and widow. Both the “maid” plot and the “wife” plot amply fulfill the title’s promise: the former features a maid who is faithful, clever, and resourceful in the tradition of the cross-dressed heroine, while in the latter, Lady Perfect passes her husband’s chastity test with flying colours, reducing both him and the deceitful friend he employed to seduce her to penitent tears for presuming to attempt her honor. The “widow” plot in Amends for Ladies is evidently based on the assumption that the real smear against widows is not the suggestion that they might remarry, but that they are sexually available outside of marriage. A virtuous widow, the kind of widow whom both women and men presumably will accept as exemplary, can still be desirous, bawdy, lonely, eager to remarry, in love with a much younger man, and not turned off by aggressive courtship. Lady Bright may be “the fairest, wisest, chastest, richest Widdow that ever conversation coapt withall” (1.1.191–93), but she is far from being cold or uninterested in sensual matters. Her opening speech, in which she praises

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the estate of widow over that of maid or wife, makes it clear that she enjoys being her “own commander,” likes “the blisse / Of wooers,” and has a frank appreciation of “what that is, men with their wives do doe” (1.1.40–41, 53). Despite the pleasure she takes in “wooers,” she has for unspecified reasons commanded one of her suitors, Bould, to “forbeare [her] sight” (1.1.226), but the enterprising young man disguises himself as an elderly waiting woman named Mary Princox and is referred into Lady Bright’s employment by Lord Feesimple. The audience is then treated to a titillating scene as the disguised Bould, alone with Lady Bright in her bedchamber, undresses his mistress and shares an intimate, bawdy conversation with her about sex and men.16 The widow’s conversation is filled with sexual jokes and innuendo, which she cheerfully defends on the grounds that “if ill come into my fancie, I will purge it by speech” (3.3.39–40); evidently, her fancy runs much on one theme. She also declares herself partial to “masculine” men: “I like not these starch’d gallants: masculine faces and masculine gestures please me best” (3.3.94–96). When Princox asks her opinion of Bould, she disparages him as too masculine, so far from the effeminate extreme of the “starch’d Gallant” that “he spends as much time to make himselfe slovenly, as the other to be spruse” (3.3.107–09). Speaking of Bould, however, seems to make the widow suddenly feel her own loneliness, for she concludes her criticism of him with the words “Princox, I would have you lie with me, I doe not love to lie alone” (3.3.113–15). This is just the chance that Bould has been waiting for. In what is almost a literal staging of how sexual aggression can confirm masculinity in the face of a widow’s power, Bould strips off the maidservant disguise that physically marks his position of feminized subservience and heads off to the widow’s bed to seduce her in all his masculine glory, exulting “Of[f], false disguise that hast been true to me, / And now be Bould, that thou mai’st welcome be” (3.3.130–31). Ostensibly, Bould fails. The next the audience sees of him, Lady Bright is fending him off with a sword as she upbraids him for attempting her chastity. In the long debate which follows, she flatly refuses either to yield to his sexual demands or to marry him. The widow’s reasons for her refusal, however, are extremely specific, carefully calculated not to disturb the fantasy. Lady Bright does not turn down Bould’s advances because she is coldly chaste and uninterested in sex, nor because she is resolved never to remarry, nor because she is put off by Bould’s boldness and trickery, nor because she does not love him (she freely admits that she does [4.1.13– 17]). Rather, she produces a single, uncomplicated reason: “I had rather

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farre confound / The dearest bodie in the world to me / Then that, that bodie, should confound my soule” (4.1.83–85). By invoking a power higher than her desires or Bould’s masculine prowess, she negates neither, yet still maintains her virtue. The widow could, of course, satisfy herself, Bould, and Heaven too by agreeing to marry him, but she fears what people will say: w i d ow: I do love you so, My bloud forsakes my heart now you depart. b o u l d: S’hart, will you marrie me heereafter then? w i d ow: No, you are too yong, and I am much too old; I and unworthy, and the world will say We married not for love, good morrow servant.17 (4.1.132–37)

Undeterred, Bould goes off to hatch a plot in which he introduces the widow to his “fianc´ee” (who proves to be a man in disguise), binds her lands and goods in a promise not to hinder his marriage, and then reveals the fraud and claims the widow’s hand. Theodore Leinwand objects, understandably, that matching the widow with a man who tries twice to trick her into marriage is a rather questionable way of upholding her honor, and speculates on the audience’s need to see her strong will and forthrightness safely contained in the bonds of marriage (184). In the context of the bedroom scene, though, Bould’s stratagem to trick Lady Bright into marriage is less evidence of his underhandedness than of his ability to give her exactly what she wants: b o u l d: Then once again, I say, widdow thou’rt mine: Priest marrie us, this match I did intend, Yee are all witnesses, if thou hinder it, Widdow your lands and goods are forfeit mine. w i d ow: Ha, nay take me to, since there’s no remedie, Your Widdow (without goods) sels scurvilie: o m n e s: Whoop, God give you joy. (5.2.244–50)

Bould’s trick relieves Lady Bright from the burden of the world’s opinion; as she is “forced” into the marriage, no one can point a finger at her for marrying a man so much her junior. In fact, her friends and acquaintances immediately welcome the match with enthusiasm. Rather than failing to uphold her honor, the comedy’s conclusion assuages the widow’s own worries about her reputation while celebrating the success of yet another sexually aggressive suitor.

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Far from undermining the appeal of the lusty widow fantasy, the “virtuous” widow who refuses to satisfy her sexual appetite outside of marriage is in fact integral to it. The blackly comic subplot of Fletcher’s The Captain (1612) is a revealing counterpoint to plays in which the rich widow accepts a poor but virile husband; rather like the Cynthia plot in The Widow’s Tears, the intrigues of The Captain’s Lelia can be read as a cautionary tale of a widow who refuses to be properly accessible on the remarriage market and who receives her just deserts. Lelia’s billing in the dramatis personae, “a cunning wanton Widow,” neatly sums up how she contravenes the fantasy: a good part of her “cunning” is that she calculatingly denies access to all but wealthy suitors, seeking not to share but to augment her own considerable wealth by enticing a rich man to marry her. And her wantonness, her willingness to use men she does not intend to marry to satisfy her sexual needs, enables her to resist the marital exchange of wealth for sexual pleasure. Lelia is as sexually voracious as any suitor could hope, but as she refuses to channel her urges into the “natural” course of marriage with a poor young man, she too gets her due in being sunk to the depths of “unnatural” moral degradation. Lelia’s refusal to share her wealth is shown from the start in the worst possible light. At her first appearance, she turns her destitute old father away from her door when he comes begging her for relief with the piteous protest that he once “gave up all [his] state to make [hers] thus” (1.3.61) – probably as a portion to help her to a wealthy husband. After he departs, Lelia instructs her woman on the kind of men she should admit to the house: If thou seest They looke like men of wealth, and state, and carry Ballast of both sides like tall Gentlemen, Admit ’em, but no snakes to poyson us With poverty. (1.3.130–34)

She teaches the maidservant her “wise rule,” which is to ignore a suitor’s looks, youth, and charm unless he is wealthy, and to feign modesty “That men may fairly see / ’Tis want of meanes, not vertue makes thee fall” (1.3.147–48). Lelia thus explicitly denies herself to the kind of men who traditionally benefit from marrying a wealthy widow, the Spendalls and the Vallentines who have nothing to offer but youth and virility. When Julio, a man who evidently “promise[s] proffit” (1.3.153), knocks on her door she welcomes him with open arms. Julio, smitten by her beauty but aware of

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her reputation for wantonness, wants only a sexual relationship, but as he is rich, the widow tries to entice him into marriage. Lelia is dangerous because she seeks to invert the fantasized exchange of a widow’s wealth for the sexual prowess of the suitor. Whereas the widows in the plays which offer the fantasy are unable to resist the sex appeal of a poor but audacious suitor and so eagerly hand over their money for a marriage of pleasure, Lelia sates her appetite with non-marital sexual encounters while deploying her own nearly irresistible beauty to snare a wealthy husband. Much of the plot is taken up with Julio’s and his friend Angilo’s comical endeavors to avoid falling prey to her charms and agreeing to become the husband of this “whore” (3.4.173). While the conventional sex-for-money exchange exposes the widow’s degrading sexual need and bolsters the suitor’s masculinity, Lelia’s tactics are antithetical to this kind of compensation: the men are humiliated and overpowered by their desire for her as she seeks to exploit them for her own mercenary ends. Lelia, of course, can keep her sexual desires subjugated to her financial ones when it comes to choosing a husband because she has no scruples about taking her pleasure outside of marriage. And it is this practice, which represents a transgression both of conventional morality and of the kind of behavior that makes a widow accessible to poor suitors, that leads to her downfall. Proving her sexual tastes to be as unnatural – as un-widowlike, so to speak – as her lack of generosity, Lelia lusts after an elderly man, dismissing “young soft melting gristles” like Julio as “only for my safer ends,” which presumably are to augment her estate (3.4.7–8). A jaded sexual connoisseur, she desires the old man because he is a “greater novelty,” from whom she “may learn something in the way of lust” (4.4.122, 126). Significantly, the widow does not intend to marry the old man, nor to spend any of her wealth on him beyond what it takes to lure him into her clutches. As her language reveals, she believes her sexual favors to be sufficiently rewarding, promising that in her bed “both my treasure, body, and my soule / Are your’s to be dispos’d of” (4.4.119–20), and assuring him that when she “robs” him of his kisses she will “yet leave / Thy lips as wealthy as they were before” (4.4.144–45). When the old man reveals himself to be her father, Lelia’s punishment begins. Its first component is her moral degradation far below what she has already suffered in the audience’s eyes as a cruel daughter, a golddigger, and a whore. She now reveals herself to be capable of incest, coolly arguing that if nature had not intended her to couple with her father, “our organs / Will not be fit” (4.4.194–95). Finally, horrified beyond endurance,

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her father draws his sword on her. Angilo, who has overheard the encounter, prevents him from using it, and together they drag her away to confinement and repentance. Her father completes the punishment by confiscating her estate and marrying her to a foolish gull named Piso. Apart from being tricked into marriage with a whore, Piso must also submit to having her wealth doled out to him by her father according to his usage of her. For her sins, Lelia ends the play a penitent, having lost her estate, her independence, the wealthy match she had hoped for, and every last shred of moral decency. The widow who satisfies her sexual desires outside of marriage is, in fact, more often a subject for tragedy: a woman like the title character of Marston’s The Insatiate Countess (c. 1607), or Middleton’s Livia in Women Beware Women, who squanders her wealth on lovers instead of settling it legally on a husband,18 who sows discord instead of establishing a new household, and who ultimately pays with her life. One last comedy deserves to end this chapter. In the late summer of 1624, Dekker, Webster, Rowley, and Ford collaborated on a play with the unwieldy title of The Late Murder in Whitechapel, or Keep the Widow Waking. Licensed some time between September 3 and 15, 1624, it combines a tragic plot about a boy who murders his mother with a comic plot about a widow’s remarriage. The widow of the latter is an elderly woman who, like Widow Miniver in Dekker’s earlier Satiromastix (1601), has enough money to make her a highly sought-after bride. Three suitors – a pawnbroker, a horse courser, and a comfit maker – vie for her hand, and, as the widow evidently enjoys the attention, compliments, and gifts which they shower upon her, she perfers to keep them on the hook rather than to make a decision. But inevitably, the man who will play Tharsalio to their Rebus comes on the scene – this time, a poverty-stricken young tobacco-seller who will boldly sweep the widow off her feet with a combination of trickery and sex appeal. The tobacco-seller dresses up as a handsome, well-to-do gallant in an impressive velvet cloak, takes along a smooth-tongued lawyer for company, and goes off to invite the widow to a lavish evening of merrymaking in a tavern. The plan almost goes awry when the vintner’s boy, dressed up as a girl to present the widow with a basket of apricots that are supposedly a gift from one of the “gallant’s” tenants, hears a customer bang on a table to call for more wine and, forgetting his role, automatically calls back “anon, anon, Sir!”. But the widow is eventually plied with enough wine to make her oblivious to anything but drink and flattery: thrilled that such a fine young gallant would want her, she agrees to marry

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him. A license is swiftly procured, with much joking about how it shall marry a young fellow to a bed-ridden old woman, and the wedding is promptly performed in the tavern by a suspiciously convenient priest. By the time the rival suitors get wind of the match, their fury is to no avail – after all the time and money they have wasted in courting the widow, the tobacco-seller has wooed her, wedded her, and bedded her, all in a mere four hours. Of course, when the widow wakes up sober the next morning and realizes that her dashing new husband is no more than a poor shopkeeper who has married her for her money, she is less than pleased. But the tobacco-seller makes haste to promise her a lifetime of sexual pleasure like the night she has just enjoyed, and the old bride submits to her fate. There is no modern edition of Keep the Widow Waking. There is no extant seventeenth-century edition either, and the play’s manuscript has been unearthed only in my own fantasies of professional gratification. All that is left of Keep the Widow Waking is a bundle of Star Chamber records in the London Public Record Office (now the National Archives), records which happen to present as evidence for the prosecution the full text of a two-part ballad describing the plot of the play.19 For despite the play’s adherence to the conventions of numerous Jacobean widow-wooing plots, the widow and her tobacco-seller husband were very real: she lived in West Smithfield, unhappily close to the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell where the play was performed; he, at the time his exploits were entertaining London audiences, was lodged yet more unhappily in Newgate, awaiting trial on a variety of charges relating to what the court termed his “pretended marriage.” The case was brought to light by Charles Sisson in 1927, in two articles published in The Library.20 Sisson does an admirable job of putting together the facts and dates of a complex case, supplementing his examination of the Star Chamber records with information from the Middlesex Sessions and from the office of the Master of the Revels. Clearly interested in the play and its legal aftermath as a piece of literary history (albeit one he finds thoroughly distasteful for its sensationalism), he painstakingly indentifies all parties involved in the theatrical side of the affair, speculates on the collaborators’ contributions, and includes facsimiles and full transcriptions of Dekker’s answer and deposition; he also prints a transcription of the ballad, which I have reproduced here. But where Sisson reconstructs the real-life story of the widow and the tobacco-seller as a backdrop to the activities of the playwrights and the other theatre people, I want to look at how the theatrical re-enactment of their marriage functioned within the case as a whole, for together the play and the lawsuit provide what is perhaps the period’s most

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fascinating, if unorthodox, example of how the stage figure of the lusty widow could be deployed to enable remarriage. Keeping the widow wakeing or let him that is poore and to wealth would aspire gett some old rich widdowe and grow wealthye by her, to the tune of the blazing torch.21 Yow yong men whoe would marrye well, but are through want restrain’d Come list to that w[hi]ch I shall tell, of one who wealth obtayn’d, by wedding of a widow rich all poore yong girles forsakeing, he got this prize his hap was such, to keep the widow wakeing. This widowe as I sayd before, in treasure much abounded, of gold & silver she had store, w[hi]ch many suitors wounded, More than the darts of Venus boy, yet she them all forsakeing, kept it for him who had this toy, to keepe the widdow wakeing.

Although he p[ro]fered love to her, t’was gold he most affected, for wealth will withered age p[re]fere, when youth that is poore rejected. yet while they to effect this match, refused noe paines takeing, another quicklye did dispatch to keepe the widow wakeing, ffor while those three and many more, long tyme had wooed by guifts, A young man that was verie poore, and lived by spend thrifts, w[hi]ch to his house resorted still, Tobacco daylye taking, He first of all devised this shifte to keepe the widow wakeing,

The suitors were in nomber three, that to this widowe went, And each one strove who should be he, could give her best content, One was a broker by his trade, and liv’ed by Pawnes takeing, He had noe lucke though he assayed, to keepe the widow wakeing.

This yong man who thus lived by fume, when he heard all this doeing, A gallant state he did assume And to her wen [sic] a wooing. Thought he if I can gett this prise, t’will suerly be my making Then he this Crochet did devise, to keep the widow wakeing,

The second was a Horse Courser, whose stocke lay all in Jadges [sic], he thought to match him selfe with her, thus wealth his mynd perswades, The third would wyn with sweete words, he practiz’t Comfit making, But all his wit noe tricke affords to keepe the widowe wakeing,

But better is two heads then one, bout such a weightye matter, Therefore he would not goe alone, but ere that he came at her, he wiselye tooke with him along, lest he should faile through speakeing, A Lawyer with a nimble tongue, who kept the widow wakeing.

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Thus like a Gallant in array, with his fine smooth tongu’d tutor, He to the widow went that day, and kindly did salute her,

Into a Taverne he her got where w[i]th much merry making, In litle tyme they fayled not to keepe the widdow wakeing.

The second p[ar]te of w[hi]ch libellous Ballett, followeth in these words Nowe they that rightlye would conceive, the meaning of this phrase, Marke what ensues, & then p[er]ceive The sequell all bewrayes, This widow being plyed with wyne, until her braynes were akeing, she married was in such a vaine, t’was hard to keep her wakeing.

The yong man did noe tyme delay, but quicklye did dispatch, The priest some certaine words did say, and soe made upp the match, Thus in foure howers the youth was sped, in such a mood her takeing, They wo’od, were married went to bed to keepe the widow wakeing,

This yong man wiselye did invent, before he went about her, to frustrate each impediment, might make him goe without her, A priest he had p[ro]vided there who got her in that takeing, That shee agreed they married were, for w[hi]ch they kept her wakeing,

The other Suitors hearing all, How they were thus defeated, Their furye was I thinke not small, to see them selves thus Cheated, Yet could they not tell who to blame, but her for them off shakeing, They lost their time another came, and kept the widow wakeing.

ffor having as is said before transformed himselfe soe strange, He like a Gentleman did rore, I n’ere saw such a change, He that before to light the smoke, w[i]th Coales for fire was rakeing. Had now got on a Velvet Cloake, to keepe the widdow wakeing.

The new wife comeinge to her selfe, did finde she was deceaved, And that he tooke her more for pelfe then love she well p[er]ceaved. O prethee peace (quoth he) good wife twas but a small mistakeing. Ile be a comfort all thy life a nights to keep the [sic] wakeing.

There he decla’rd what land he had, both arrable & meadow, w[hi]ch did reioyce & make full glad, the hart of this old widdowe, To thinke that such a brave yong man, should keepe her hart from akeing, Her head was light, her tongue still ran, whoe keeps the widow wakeing.

Thus sometimes that haps in an houre, that comes not in seaven yeare, Therefore lett yong men that are poore, come take example here, And you whoe faine would heare the full discourse of this match makeing, The play will teach you at the Bull, to keepe the widdow wakeing.

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The widow of Keep the Widow Waking was Anne Elsdon, aged sixty-two. Her late husband John, described as “a gentleman,” had left her in very comfortable circumstances, with land that brought in a hundred pounds a year, and a house in West Smithfield, where she enjoyed her personal property of about a thousand pounds worth of “money plate Jewells & Chattells.”22 Anne had one daughter, Elizabeth, respectably married to a wealthy citizen named Benjamin Garfield and living in nearby Clerkenwell.23 The tobacco-seller was Tobias Audley, a young widower aged something under thirty, who lived in Woode Street.24 Audley had first met Anne in June of 1624, as she was on her way to the Seven Stars tavern in West Smithfield in the company of another widow by the name of Margery Terry and a clergyman called Francis Holiday. Being a friend of Holiday’s, Audley jokingly asked him where he was off to with two women, and the clergyman replied “that they were two weddowes who were goeinge w[i]th him to the Taverne to drinke, whereupon . . . Audley said, that hee was then a wyddower and that hee woulde spende his pynte allso if the saide weddowes woulde accepte of his company, whose offer the said weddowes . . . willingly accepted.”25 Audley, learning of Anne’s wealth, soon began to court her as a suitor, meeting with her at least three times before July 21.26 On that particular summer evening, a Wednesday, Anne and Audley went together to a private room in the Greyhound tavern in the Blackfriars, accompanied by Anne’s neighbor Martha Jackson, where they drank wine with a number of Audley’s friends, including Holiday, Terry, another clergyman called Nicholas Cartmell, and a younger woman, Marie Spenser. By the time Anne returned home – on Monday 26, five days later – she and Audley were married, having spent the intervening days and nights in a succession of taverns, including the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, the Bell in Audley’s neighborhood of Woode Street, and an unnamed establishment in Lambeth, to which they repaired after a boat ride over the Thames and a walk in St. George’s Fields. The expenses for this nuptial spree were paid by Anne, with money that Audley fetched out of her house while she stayed at the Nag’s Head. But then, a mere two weeks into the marriage, Audley was arrested and hauled into court at the suit of Anne’s son-in-law Garfield, beginning a case that would achieve sufficient notoriety over the course of the next month to be brought on stage at the Red Bull. This much, both the prosecution and the defence would probably agree to, although the prosecution might well object to the unqualified use of the word “marriage.” Their term of choice was “pretended marriage.” According to the prosecution, Audley was “a most notorious lewde p[er]son and of noe worth or Creditt”:27 a witness named John Snow deposes that “Audley was

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verie poore and needie,” volunteering the interesting detail that “on the Tuesday before the p[re]tended marriadge betweene Anne Allesden and him, hee . . . sould the bedd hee lay upon to furnishe him selfe w[i]th money;” Garfield calls Audley a “shiftinge fellowe of no reckoninge or worth” and darkly adds that he “had been questioned or suspected for stealinge of plate.” Anne, understandably, had no interest in a suitor so far beneath herself: she flatly informed him “that shee would none of him, and that shee was married unto her grave and that if shee would . . . marrie, she would marrie a man, and not a beggarlie boy, as he was, she terming him sundry times, boy, and rogue, and beggar, w[i]th divers such like speeches.”28 Despite her age, Anne could have easily “married a man” had she so desired, for as her friend Martha Jackson testifies, “Anne Ellesden might in the tyme of her widowhood have beene married to men of good worth and credit but . . . was never willing to marry but hath in this dep[onen]ts hearing & p[re]s[e]nce denyed the suites and offers of men of good qualitie & sufficiency.” Seeing his suit was hopeless, Audley resorted to subterfuge. With Holiday and Terry as his “abettors and setters on,”29 he enticed Anne to the Greyhound with the promise that if she would “drinke a quart of wyne at the said Taverne for a farewell . . . he would never move or attempt to move her therafter any further.” Anne, “in hope to be Ridde and freed” from her unwanted suitor, agreed to go as long as she could bring Martha Jackson. Showing the unsuspecting women into a private room where the co-conspirators were waiting, Audley and his crew “most unlawfully wickedlye & corruptlye give unto the said Anne Elsdon & to the said Martha Jackson a great quantitie of severall sorts of wyne pressing & compelling them to drinke the same”; the wine was followed up with “a stupefied potion in shewe of an ordinarie cup of wyne.”30 When both women were thoroughly intoxicated, Audley began to harrass them about the match, angrily claiming that Anne had promised him marriage and that Jackson had been a witness.31 Evidently hoping that enough alcohol might bring Anne to some kind of promise, Audley continued to press drink on her late into the night; when the women tried to go home, they were told that the tavernkeeper, Robert Taylor, had locked up the house and gone to bed with the key, and that they would have to stay the night. Jackson made the mistake of going down into the kitchen, and the others locked her out of the room, where Anne had fallen into a drunken stupor by the side of the table. Now that Jackson was safely excluded from his “witnesses,” Audley “contracted” himself to the unconscious widow, paid Taylor five shillings – perhaps from the proceeds of his bed – to have a “pallat” set up on the floor for the widow to lie on, and then

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triumphantly transformed the “contract” into a binding marriage: “when shee [Anne] was gone to bedd, the said Audley putt of his clothes, and came to his said companie, and cried all was his owne; and then went into the roome where the said Anne so lay distempered, and went to bedd to her.”32 Intent on securing Audley’s right to Anne’s estate with nothing less than a fully legal marriage, the conspirators kept the widow “sicke and senceles”33 through the following day. They let Jackson go home, but took Anne to the Nag’s Head in Cheapside via a detour through Lambeth and St. George’s fields, where they hoped the fresh air would stimulate the previous day’s “stupefied potion” to yet greater effect. They then re-intoxicated Anne to the point of unconsciousness with more “wyne and strong waters” at the Nag’s Head, while Audley went to procure a marriage licence, and Francis Wise, the tavernkeeper, “caused a bedd to bee sett upp in a roome in the saied Naggs head Taverne where there was none before of purpose for him the saied Audley and the saied Anne to lie therin.”34 On Audley’s return with the licence, Cartmell went through a travesty of the marriage ceremony, omitting of necessity “div[er]se ceremonies to be used & spoken by the saide Anne, being at that tyme bereaved of her senses.”35 Where Anne was supposed to speak, one of the conspirators took her by the jaw and “shooke her chinne as if she had repeated such words as the said Cartmell directed her.”36 Once again, Audley consummated the bogus match, and this time felt secure enough to take Anne’s key out of her pocket and head off to West Smithfield to rifle her house of “money plate jewells & housholdstuffe . . . being of the value of Three thousand pounds att the least together w[i]th the bills bonds specialtyes of the said Anne Elsden of great value and the Conveyances and wrytings of the said Anne Elsdens lands of inheritance.”37 He divided the money with his co-conspirators, each of whom had been promised a certain share of the booty. While Anne’s daughter searched worriedly for her mother in Rumford – directed there by one of Anne’s debtors, whom Audley had bribed to put the Garfields off his trail – Audley and his confederates moved Anne from the Nag’s Head to the Bell, keeping her drunk, sleepless, and under constant guard, until they finally took her back to her ransacked home, five days after her ordeal had begun. This story formed the backbone of Garfield’s accusations against Audley and his friends. Audley, however, fired back with the claim that Garfield’s real reason for wanting to prove his mother-in-law’s marriage fraudulent and invalid had less to do with filial outrage than with shattered financial expectations. Since Garfield, as the husband of Anne’s only daughter,

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stood to inherit the bulk of the widow’s property upon her death, the unexpected diversion of that property to a new husband in his twenties would be unwelcome indeed. Anne, according to Audley, had herself been worried that Garfield and her daughter would try to “prevent or crosse her resoluc[i]on to marry” her young suitor, and therefore had had the marriage conducted in secrecy, orchestrating their movement from one tavern to another so as to avoid detection. Moreover, Audley faced family opposition of his own: when his brother John, a grocer, appeared as a defendant on charges of having received Anne’s property from Audley after his imprisonment, he indignantly informed the court that he had hardly thought Anne a glittering match for his young sibling: far from being “anie actor, agent, or incourager” of the marriage, he and his uncle William had earnestly tried to persuade Audley against marrying “an old woman, . . . in reguard hee could have none issue by her.”38 In the defence’s Bill of Information, drawn up on December 10, 1624, Audley describes his wooing of the widow. Like many of his fictional counterparts, he sees no inherent contradiction between his avowedly mercenary interest in Anne and her romantic interest in him, nor does he hesitate to admit to the court that the object of his desire was in her said weddowehood allso possessed of a great p[er]sonall estate farr surmountinge the value sett forth in the said Informac[i]on: this defendant verely beleivinge her p[er]sonall estate in money plate Juells housholdestuffe, and chattells to be of about the valewe of Three Thousande poundes. Whereof this defend[an]t having notice, and beenge further informed that the saide Anne did use daylie to entertayne suitors in the way of Marriage, hee . . . beinge a widdower, and desyrous to raise his fortunes, It is true that about the begineinge of June last past he did become a suitor to the saide Ann his nowe wife in the way of marriage; And fyndinge her willinge and inclyneable to this defendaunts suite, for that she gave him often entertaynement hee this defend[an]t did not lett passe any lawfull opportunity of meanes in the obtayninge of the saide Ann to bee his wife, and the rather, because she the said Anne having given entertaynment to many other suitors in the way of marriage, who had spent much money in her company in hoop to have gotten her to wife, she at last lefte them . . .

Francis Holiday, fearing that his friend Audley might be threaded onto this string of frustrated suitors, confesses that he eventually had a word with the widow, and did . . . tell her that the said Audley kept her companie late in the nights, and at other times to the losse of his time, and the consumption of his purse; and therefore . . . willed her, that if she would not marrie him, to tell him so; that hee

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might forbeare her companie, and follow his bussines; and the said Anne Elsden then made answere, that in despight of her sonne in lawe (whoe shee said had robbed her, and gott a pott of gould of hers from a place where shee had sett it under her Chimney hearth) shee woulde marrie the said Tobias Audley, and noe man but him.39

Thereafter, when Audley was “in her company desyringe her consent in the way of marriage, she the saide Ann very willingly agreed thereunto; and for the manifestac[i]on of her consent to the saide then intended marriage, she the saide Ann accquainted one Martha Jackson her familie ffreinde . . . w[i]th the loveing affecc[i]on w[hi]ch she did beare to this defend[an]t in the way of marriage.”40 On July 21, Anne invited her confidante to go with her and her intended husband to the Greyhound. There, as Audley pointedly notes, “there was such and soe much wyne called for as the saide Ann desyred to drinke, whose disposic[i]on this defend[an]t woulde not contradict fearinge least hee shoulde thereby have incurred her displeasure.” If Anne’s disposition was to get tipsy, it was certainly not his fault, who never “did p[er]swade, alure, enforce, or compell” her to drink anything, let alone drug her with potions. The couple and their friends stayed up all night, making merry “in a good and decent manner.” The next day, hoping to evade Garfield, Anne led the party to Lambeth (where she had a nap), and then to the Nag’s Head tavern in Cheapside, promising Audley that she would marry him there. She kept her word: on July 22, she was formally betrothed to him in the presence of Nicholas Cartmell, Margery Terry, and others, “the saide Ann joyninge handes and usinge the wordes of contract . . . in good and p[er]fect sence and memory.” Anne then sent Audley to her house with her key to fetch money for the wedding expenses, and on his return, gave some of it to Cartmell to purchase them a license, dated for the next day. The clergyman demurred at marrying anyone in a tavern, but “thay boathe semeinge impatient of delay sent to one Willyam Durham a proctor to p[ro]cure them a dispensac[i]on for the place,” and once they had “p[ro]cured or p[re]tend[ed] to p[ro]cure a dispensac[i]on for that purpose,” Cartmell relented and performed the marriage. The newlyweds spent the next two nights honeymooning at the Nag’s Head, and the following night at the Bell (where, according to tavernkeeper Thomas Hopkins, they came to be more “private”), before Hopkins’s servants lighted them home to West Smithfield – much to the relief of Audley’s prudent brother John, who had earlier advised the couple to “goe to theire owen house and to forbeare any waste or expence of money in any Taverne or other place abroade.”41

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But Garfield, whose meddling Anne had so cunningly sought to evade, eventually proved too much for her. Audley bitterly describes how the sonin-law soon managed to poison Anne’s mind, to the destruction of their marriage: Benjamin Garfeilde p[er]seavinge that his mother in lawe had married this defend[an]t whereby he conceaved some loss or hindrance woulde come unto him, whoe as it sithence hath appeared then, and before, thirsted after her whole estate and sithence hath carried or caused to bee convayed away into some place or places unknowen the value of about Three Thousande powdes of her estate, and for that purpose . . . Garfeilde used all the meanes hee coulde to disswade and w[i]thdraw the love and affecc[i]on of the saide Ann from this defend[an]t her housbonde, and not onley p[er]swaded her to carry away out of her house a greate p[ar]te of her money and goodes but allso caused this defend[an]t to bee arested in London upon a playnt of Six hundred powndes or thereabouts. . . .42

After his wife deserted him, Audley managed to salvage about a hundred and forty pounds worth of her property – now “properly belonginge to himselfe by reason of the saide marriage” – while he was out on bail. But he was now back in prison, where Garfield and the turncoat Anne were obviously intent on keeping him. While I have taken the defendants’ version primarily from their Bill of Information (where, unlike in the depositions, they tell their own side of the matter without prompting from the court’s list of interrogatories), I have had to supplement the prosecution’s Information, narrated by Garfield, with details from its depositions. For if we were to listen solely to Garfield’s story in the Bill of Information, we would be led to conclude that Audley never did consummate his relationship with Anne, conscious or unconscious, willing or unwilling. The sexual details of the case – the five-shilling pallet at the Greyhound, the naked Audley crowing that “all was his own,” the bed at the Nag’s Head, portentously introduced into “a Roome . . . where there was none before”43 – all come forth only in response to the questioning of the court. The defendants, on the other hand, take every opportunity to sexualize the relations between Audley and the widow, beginning with a romantic account of the courtship: Audley describes Anne’s “loveing affecc[i]on” for him, and how she called him “her sweeteharte;” Cartmell “observed many changes of loveinge affecc[i]ons” between the couple at the Greyhound; while Holiday “did see many passages of love to bee betweene them” both there and “at divers other places.” In response to the court’s pointed question as to whether he thought “Anne Elsden being threescore yeares ould and upwards a competent or fitt marriage for . . . Tobias Audley he being a young boye and of noe worth,” Holiday maintains that she was

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so, “in regard shee p[ro]fessed herselfe to love him.”44 Although none of the defendants goes so far as to suggest that the pair consummated their love before their legal marriage at the Nag’s Head, Audley relishingly relates what happened afterwards, when he and his new wife did supp that night at the saide ffrauncis Wise his house, and did after consumate the same marriage, and lay there together in bedd not onely that night but allso on the next night followinge, beinge the ffower and Twentieth day of the said moneth of July, and the thirde night beinge the ffive and Twentieth day of July this defend[an]t and his saide wife lay in bedd together at the house of the defend[an]t Thomas Hoppkins beinge in Woodstreete London . . . [and on the next day] this defend[an]t and his wife went home to the late house of the saide Ann and then this defend[an]ts house . . . and there lay in bedd together all that night, this defend[an]t faythfully purposinge & purposinge (sic) to have lived & continued wth her as an honest housbonde ought to have done.45

At the Nag’s Head, Edward Hide “did see the saide Tobias and Ann in bedd together, and heard musicke playde unto them, and [they] were saluted as man and wife by some of the neighboures.” Nor were Hide and the neighbors the only people to see the couple in bed, for tavern keeper Francis Wise reports that “on the Sunday morninge the Churchwardens cominge into this defend[an]ts house accordinge to theire custome to see good orders did fynde the saide Tobias and Ann in bedd together, and then and theire they boath did confesse in this defend[an]ts hearinge that they were married together.”46 All this bedroom attention might explain why Anne – according to Thomas Hopkins – decided to remove to his tavern, the Bell, “desyringe to have a lodgeinge theire that night, for her housbonde and her selfe, affirminge that she was wearie of her other company desyringe to bee private.” Anne, relates Hopkins “willed that none shoulde come unto her but her housbonde Tobias Audley whoe not longe after came unto her, and thay boath lay in bedd together in this defend[an]ts house all that night.”47 Apart from a desire on Garfield’s part to spare his mother-in-law’s modesty, there are some sound legal reasons why he shies away from the matter of consummation while the defendants dwell on it. For one thing, the more sexual activity that transpired between Anne and Audley, the greater the appearance of the widow’s consent, or at least her resignation: it would be difficult, to say the least, to repeatedly, forcibly rape someone in three different public taverns without her finding some opportunity to complain or to escape. More important, however, is the fact that if the court were to decide that Anne had made some ill-advised contract with Audley, let alone undergone a wedding ceremony, sexual intercourse between the two would

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have legally ratified their marriage, however much Anne or her son-in-law may have regretted it afterwards. Accordingly, Garfield’s Information portrays the whole matter more as a kind of elaborate kidnapping and robbery scheme (the conspirators got Anne drunk, kept her hidden, stole her keys, and ransacked her house while “giv[ing] forth in speeches” that Audley was her husband) than as a serious attempt to secure Anne’s property by bullying her into a legally valid marriage. When the court presses him to relate what he has “crediblie heard” about events at the Greyhound, Garfield’s answer implies that even if there had appeared to be consummation, it too was probably fraudulent, for “Tobias Audley ymediately putt of his clothes & went into bed to the saide Anne & after some shorte staye there Came downe in his shirte (makinge great noise in the saide taverne) sayinge . . . that all was his owne.” As none of the other witnesses makes any mention of how long Audley stayed in the bed, and all place his gleeful announcement before he goes there, Garfield’s version seems intent on diminishing the sexual side of the business as all “noise” and no action. But the defendants’ insistent sexualization of Anne and her relations with Audley has an effect beyond the legal issues of consummation and consent. This is where the court case intersects most strikingly with the play, Keep the Widow Waking, and with the ballad sung to advertise it in the London streets, for like the defendants’ testimony about Anne’s “loveing affecc[i]on” for the young man and the number of times the pair “lay in bedd together,” the play and the ballad work to reduce Anne to the familiar figure of the lusty widow, and thereby to empower Audley through disempowering her. The unanswerable question of the defendants’ intent in presenting their evidence this way can remain open, as can the equally impenetrable matter of whether Dekker and the other playwrights, Rafe Savage who commissioned the play, or Richard Hodgkins who wrote the ballad, were somehow in league with or paid by Audley.48 Actual intent is here less relevant than the perceived intent and the very real effect of these representations. And as to what that was, the prosecution is perfectly clear: But the said Tobyas Audley and the said other confederates not resting thus satisfied but intending forthwith to make Jest or merryment of their unlawfull and wicked acc[i]ons . . . thereby to scandalize & disgrace the said Anne Elsden & to make her infamous thereby to give some collour to the said p[re]tended marriage, he the said Tobyas Audley and the said other Confederates did most unlawfully and wickedly practise resolve and agree to draw into their said practise one William Rowley now dead [space] deckers, Richard Hodskyns, Aaron Holland Thomas ffuller clerk Rafe Savidge and others being Com[m]on enterlude players, and contrivors of libellous

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playes and balletts whoe should contrive & make a play and balletts of the said p[re]tended marriage . . . and the ryfeling and getting of the said Anne Elsdens estate as aforesaid . . .

Accordingly, the playwrights produced “one scandalous enterlude or play most tauntinglye nameing the same enterlude or play Keepe the widdowe wakeinge,” which resulted, unsurprisingly, in “the great infamy & scandall of . . . Anne Elsden,” making her “ridiculous to the world.” Garfield tried desperately to suppress the play, first by paying twenty shillings to the deputy Master of the Revels, and then by appealing to the players at the Red Bull, but despite his pleas, the play was “often acted.”49 And the ballad, which the prosecution transcribes in full to lay forth its “libellous & freevylous jests & Taunts,” made things much worse. Not only was it a blatant advertisement for the play, concluding with words “to the end that all people might notice that the said play at the bull did more fully sett forth the meaning of the said ballett,” but the conspirators took an extra step to make sure that everyone knew exactly whom the ballad and the play were about. The prosecution alleges that they did cause & p[ro]cure the said first & second p[ar]ts of the said Ballett to be songe under the Chamber windowe of the said Anne Elsden at her dwelling house, & in divers other places. . . . And did publish draw & make interp[re]tac[i]on of the same, that the said words of keeping the widdowe wakeing was intended of the same Anne Elsden, & that all the said rydiculous phrases concerning the widdow in the said playe & Ballett were intended of the said Anne Elsden.50

The conspirators’ efforts were evidently not in vain, for at least one of their “rydiculous phrases” attached itself firmly to Anne: Garfield complains that after his mother-in-law moved in with him, a pair of “play boyes” from the Red Bull strolled by his house, one pointing at it and informing the other that “there dwells the widdowe waking.”51 According to the prosecution, Audley’s intent in making Anne the local laughingstock was “to give some collour to the said p[re]tended marriage”: in other words, to help his legal case – for he was already being prosecuted by Garfield when the play and ballad appeared – by making this rather unlikely marriage seem more plausible.52 And to do so, he turned to the theatre, which offered the perfect ready-made mold in which to cast his new bride. When the stage transformed the real-life Anne Elsdon, sixty-two year old resident of West Smithfield, into “the widdowe waking,” she became defined by a phrase that exemplified a widow’s sexual susceptibility. “Keep the widow waking” was evidently proverbial advice to widow-wooers more than twenty-five years before it became the title of the scandalous play at

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the Red Bull. In 1595, it appears, fittingly enough, in the satirical account of another widow inveigled into marriage, a tripe-seller called Mrs. Mescall. After the failure of a plan to entice the widow through a hired fortuneteller named Doll Phillips, one of her suitors succeeds through more direct means: Now you that be lovers, tell mee whether it were a hot signe of love or no, when the Widdowe (sitting asleepe by the fire) hee valiantly (coming behinde her) pulled her stoole from her, when downe fell she, and he by or upon her, with that learned and wittie adverbe in his mouth, Keepe the widdow waking. Well, I know not whether these words are able to enchaunt or no, or what strength or vigor the manly acting of them hath: but either thorough them, or her late sitting up that night, she tooke such a surfet, that needes she must to bed. (Grosart, 164–65)53

In Wit Without Money, Vallentine’s threat to Lady Hartwell – “Widdow Ile keepe you waking” (5.4.50) – promises the same kind of “manly” performance. To title a play Keep the Widow Waking was automatically to sexualize its title character, and as far as one can tell from the ballad, the play did not disappoint. Not only is the widow consumed with desire for the enticing package of virile youth and landed status offered by her young suitor, but the true proof of her nature appears when the assurance of sexual satisfaction is offered as an (apparently successful) means of overcoming her anger at being tricked: The new wife comeinge to her selfe, did finde she was deceaued, And that he tooke her more for pelfe, then love she well p[er]ceaued. O Prethee peace (quoth he) good wife twas but a small mistakeing. Ile be a comfort all thy life a nights to keepe the[e] wakeing.

What the prosecution denounces as one of the torments Anne’s captors inflicted on her – they “did most unlawfullye watch the said Anne Elsden both day and night and kept her from sleepe divers dayes and nights together” – the ballad transforms into a sexual joke about what the widow “really” wanted. The effect is similar to a moment in the depositions when Thomas Hopkins, owner of the Bell tavern, is asked how long the defendants “did . . . keepe the said Anne Elsden watching & w[i]thout sleepe during her contynuaunce . . . in the said sev[er]all Tavernes,”54 and leeringly replies “that hee doth not know how long the said Anne Elsden was

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kept watching, or what sleepe at anie other Taverne or Tavernes where shee had bin before her coming to this dep[onen]ts said house; but in the defend[an]ts said house she was not kept watching at all, ffor shee and the said Tobias Audley went to bed together there in an orderly and due time, and lay in bed together there all night, and the next night.”55 The two additional details about the play which we learn from the depositions speak further to its sexualization of the widow. If the number of times Anne’s character “went to bed” in the play approached the defendants’ emphasis on that activity, the scene in which Audley’s character explains that he needs a license “for the marying of an old bed ridden woman and a young fellowe together”56 must have lent the phrase “bed-ridden” a decidedly bawdy innuendo. Her desires are also hinted at in the scene where she is offered “apricocks” – a fruit with well-known phallic connotations – by a cross-dressed vintner’s boy.57 If, as the prosecution alleges, Audley and his companions did indeed enact the original version of this scene for their own amusement at the Nag’s Head before it was imported into the play, the conspirators certainly had a keen enjoyment of the theatrical, and a sense of how it might be used to humiliate. As Sisson points out, this alleged practical joke, in which Anne’s gift of “apricocks” is comically exposed as a boy in drag with an empty basket, probably would have been practiced only after Audley considered himself securely married to her (2:242). In the play, it could be dramatically successful either as a comical narrow escape for the wooer (the scenario I suggested earlier, where the tobacco-seller’s ploy to impress with a gift from his “tenants” is almost ruined by an inexperienced actor), or as the method by which the newly married widow discovers, too late, that her husband is not what he seems. Wherever the playwrights inserted the scene, the tobacco-seller’s choice of fruit points at the widow’s sexual appetite, enabling him to offer himself as a satisfying alternative to the evanescent “apricocks.” The play and ballad, we should note, do not support Audley’s straightforward claims of Anne’s love for him and her consent to the marriage: in fact, they depict him unambiguously as a schemer and a fraud. The damage perceived by the prosecution, then, is less that these representations will whitewash Audley (the public’s approval of fraud is generally confined to the playhouse) than that they will assimilate Anne to the stage figure of the lusty widow, a woman who cannot be wronged by even the most outrageous and aggressive of courtship tactics. Sung under Anne Elsdon’s window, offering itself and the play as advice to the young men of London on how to marry a rich widow, the ballad sets up a circular game

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of mirrors in which Anne’s sexual proclivities are reflected onto all widows, and the already-known sexual proclivities of all widows are reflected back onto Anne. Keep the Widow Waking and the circumstances which produced it thus provide a startlingly literal manifestation of the dynamic that this chapter has traced in such comedies as The Widow’s Tears, Wit Without Money, and Ram Alley: the sexually-charged representations of the play and ballad, together with the defendants’ courtroom narratives of Anne’s desire, were deployed – or at least were perceived to be deployed – as weapons to undermine the power of a wealthy, high-status widow and her eminently respectable family in their lawsuit against “a shiftinge fellowe of no reckoninge or worth” and a group of “needy & necessitous” people variously described as being “of noe worth or esteeme,” “of noe creditt,” and “of noe accompt amongst their neighbors.” Where a suitor like Tharsalio used erotic innuendo and sexual promise to excite the Countess Eudora to the point where she was prepared to humble herself in marriage to her former servant, Audley, that “beggarlie boy,” took his sexualization of Anne Elsdon to the courts and streets of London in an attempt to “collour,” defend, and legally enable his own profitable marriage. Recourse to such textual methods was necessary, we might note, because any actual plan to sexually pacify the widow had encountered at least one real-life obstacle – John Snow reports that when Anne became troublesome the morning after her “marriage” at the Nag’s Head, “exclaiming that some rogues had robd her, and gotten away her keyes,” Marie Spenser and Margery Terry advised Audley “to goe to bedd to her and make much of her, and soe stopp her exclamac[i]ons, unto w[hi]ch the said Audley replied that hee had as leive goe to bedd to an old Sowe.” Once in prison, though, Audley was ready to reconsider, for he closes his statement in the Bill of Information on a hopeful note, relating the following bit of wonderfully stage-worthy dialogue between himself and his new wife: she the saide Ann then useinge theise or the like wordes to this defend[an]t followinge . . . I meaninge the said Ann have deceived many but nowe thou hast overtaken me by marrienge me yett I am contented therew[i]th if thou wilt love me, w[hi]ch this defend[an]t then purposed and promised and still doethe intende to doe if she will deserve it and suffer him to enjoy the right belonging unto him as hir housbonde by reason of the saide marriage.

“You are rich in Mony, Lands, and Lordships, / Manors and fayre Possessions” declares Spendall in Greene’s Tu Quoque, as he brandishes a dagger at the Widow Raysby,

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and I have not so much As one poor coppy-hold to thrust my head in. Why should you not them have compassion Upon a reasonable handsome fellow, That has both youth and livelihod upon him; And can at midnight quicken and refresh Pleasures decayed in you? (2533–539)

Insofar as the court believed Audley’s version of his marriage to the Widow Elsdon, his debt to the theatre went far beyond Keep the Widow Waking.

chap t e r 4

The husband’s fear: the lusty widow as wife

“. . . in the end she died, leaving her husband wondrous wealthie” Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury (1597), 25

There is something intuitively problematic about a strategy of compensation in which female sexual appetite is to provide reassurance to early modern males. However neatly plays like Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), or Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1614) – or Keep the Widow Waking (1624) – may package the widow’s lust as a tool to defuse her challenge to a husband’s domestic authority, they do so against the thrust of that other, more common cultural coding of female sexuality: rapacious, irrational, bestial, destructive; a general threat to the rational male order of things, and a private threat to the personal honor of individual men. One might justifiably charge that although my own theory of how various play texts construct a fantasy of male sexual mastery accounts for anxieties of financial and domestic control, it tends to overlook intimations of a different kind of anxiety. When, to win Eudora, Tharsalio of Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604) must resort to advertising himself as “the most incontinent and insatiate man of women that ever Venus blessed with ability to please them,” capable of making “nine in a night . . . mad with his love” (2.2.75–77; 87– 88), or when in Wit Without Money, Vallentine marches Lady Hartwell off to church with vehement protests of his manhood, would an early modern audience have been able to suppress associations of the kind so vividly laid out by Jonson’s Quarlous? A sweet course for a man to waste the brand of life for, to be still raking himself a fortune in an old woman’s embers; we shall ha’ thee, after thou hast been but a month married to one of ’em, look like the quartan ague and the black jaundice met in a face, and walk as if thou hadst borrowed legs of a spinner, and voice of a cricket. (Bartholomew Fair, 1.3.65–70)

In fact, Quarlous’s fantastical picture of drained virility, the result of sexual drudgery upon the body of an insatiable widow – “scrubbing a piece of 124

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buff as if thou hadst the perptuity of Pannyer Alley to stink in, or perhaps, worse, currying a carcass that thou hast bound thyself to alive (1.3.57–59) – only scratches the surface of what we might call the underside of the “lusty widow.” Sexual exhaustion, with its emphatic contradiction of the fantasy of sexual mastery, is not a commonly invoked side-effect of marrying a widow; it may be seen to be subsumed, however, into a more mundane and yet more terrifying prospect – that of the remarried widow’s potential infidelity. Beginning with an investigation of several contemporary texts which suggest that the compensation provided by the lusty widow is inherently flawed, this chapter will go on to explore how a comic scenario of profiting from yet escaping the widow circulated alongside the fantasy of marrying her for her wealth. If, as I have argued, the lusty widow stereotype works to assuage male anxieties aroused by the domineering widow-as-wife, a third stereotype – the jealous remarried widow – provides a clue to where this assuagement can break down. The jealous widow features prominently in the first chapter of Thomas Deloney’s 1597 prose narrative, Jack of Newbury. Described by Leggatt as “a fantasy of wish-fulfilment” (Citizen Comedy, 15), Jack of Newbury begins with the familiar story of a young man who establishes himself through marriage to a wealthy, desirous widow. Jack, at the start of the tale, is in the service of a weaver’s widow, a “very comely auncient Woman, and of reasonable Wealth” (5), who begins to show him signs of favor, discussing her suitors with him and dropping broad hints that she “like[s] better of one nearer hand” (8). Noticing her interest, Jack finds himself torn between his desire for the ready-made household and wealth such a match would bring him, and the fear that his mistress would prove an insubordinate wife: . . . knowing therefore the womans disposition, and withall that her estate was reasonable good, and considering beside that he should finde a house ready furnished, servants ready taught, and all other things for his trade necessarie, he thought it best not to let slip that good occasion, least hee should never come to the like. But againe, when hee considered her yeares to bee unfitting to his youth, and that she that sometime had beene his Dame, would (perhaps) disdaine to be governed by him that had beene her poore servant, that it would prove but a badde bargaine, doubting many inconveniences that might growe thereby, he therefore resolved to be silent rather than to proceed further . . . (11–12)

Well might Jack be worried, for his mistress’s desire for him as a husband stems from her appreciation that “she had never a Prentise that yeelded her more obedience then hee did, or was more dutifull” (7).

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It turns out, however, that Jack’s decision to do nothing results in his being carried passively along to prosperity on the tide of the widow’s desire. She dismisses her three wealthy suitors in favor of Jack for distinctly sexual reasons: one “being overworne in yeares makes mee overloth to love him;” another is “so long a ranger, he would be at home a stranger” (8); and the third, a parson, who is tellingly derided as a “capon” (17), “will bee so bent to his books, that he will have little minde of his bed” (9). She relates to Jack a dream that is a thinly veiled allegory of her love, pointedly tells him she intends to sleep with her chamber door open, and on a cold winter night, she plies him with sack, tucks him into “his masters best bed,” and later creeps in herself, with the excuse that “the night is so extreame cold, and my Chamber walles so thin, that I am like to be starved in my bed.” Deloney is unforthcoming about what happens in the bed – “John being a kind young man would not say her nay, and so they spent the rest of the night both together in one bed” – but the next morning the widow takes Jack to a chapel and reminds him of a promise he once made “not to hinder mee, when I came to the Church to bee married, but rather to set it forward” (20–21). Lisa Jardine describes Jack as being “tricked . . . into an actual marriage ceremony” (129), but it is highly doubtful that his promise to the widow could be upheld as a legal betrothal, or that a contemporary reader would have seen the marriage as coerced. In the similar scenario at the end of Amends for Ladies (1611), Field is careful to make the marriage appear truly obligatory by having Lady Bright bind her goods and lands as earnest of her promise not to hinder Bould; she could refuse the match, but only with the loss of her property. When Jack marries the widow at this point, he does so of his own free will; his earlier anxieties have evidently been counterbalanced, neutralized by the widow’s display of her sexual need for him. For the privilege of having Jack in her bed, the widow elevates him to the place of master over his former fellow servants, and bestows upon him household, workshop, wealth, and all. On the stage, the triumphant husband and satisfied widow would now typically yield to the epilogue, but Jack of Newbury proceeds to imagine the aftermath of marrying a woman who has been impelled to it by her sexual appetite. The newly married widow does prove as willful and ungovernable as Jack had feared, but her insubordination is depicted as a direct result of something he had feared even more: her jealousy. Before their marriage, Jack informs her that he is wary of taking a wife, as “it is a hard matter to finde a constant woman: for as young maides are fickle, so are old women jealous: the one a griefe too common, the other a torment intolerable”

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(9). He even sings her a song that dwells on this proverbial fault of “old women”: But of all the faults that be, None is so bad as jealousie. For jealousie is fierce and fell, And burnes as hot as fire in hell: It breedes suspicion without cause, And breakes the bondes of reasons lawes. To none it is a greater foe, Than unto those where it doth grow. And God keepe me both day and night, From that fell, fond, and ugly spright: For why? Of all the plagues that be, The secret plague is jealousie. Therefore I wish all womenkinde, Never to beare a jealous minde. (11)

The jealousy of widows, one should note, is as conventional as their sexual appetite or their propensity for domestic control. Older widows, especially, are assumed to live in constant suspicion that their husbands are having adulterous liaisons with younger women: Taylor’s A Juniper Lecture (1639), for instance, presents a five-times married widow who jealously berates her twenty-four-year-old spouse for being ashamed of being seen with her in the street, yet always eager to go out with “any of your old acquaintance, those young gill-flurts, who tricke up themselves like a Bartholomew-faire Babie, or any other light Gossips” (52). And while a husband’s jealousy in the early modern period is best understood as a man’s fear of the emasculating stigma of cuckoldry, female marital jealousy, a much rarer phenomenon in texts of the period, is based on no such stigma. Rather, it appears to have been seen as a function of the wife’s sense of sexual deprivation. The jealous remarried widow in The Bachelor’s Banquet (1603), for example, fears that her husband’s limited sexual energies are being expended elsewhere than in her bed: This jolly widow will, within a while grow jealous, fear and suspect that some other dame hath part of that which she so mightily desireth and wherewith she could never be satisfied, so that if he glut not her insatiable humor, straightway she conceiveth this opinion if he do but talk, nay, which is worse, look on any other woman, for she by her good will would be always in his arms or at least in his company. (126)

A similar construction of female marital jealousy as sexual deprivation is offered in The Widow’s Tears: “For wherefore,” Tharsalio asks, “rage wives at

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their husbands so, when they fly out? For zeal against the sin?”. “No,” rejoins the bawd Arsace, “but because they did not purge that sin” (2.3.27–29). Such jealousy, as “A Proverb Old, Yet Ne’er Forgot” (c. 1625) asserts, can only be taken care of with sufficient sexual attention: Some perhaps may make objection that Old-women jelous are, Let not that change thy affection, though they be doe thou not care if thou be true and give her due Shele nere mistrust thee feare it not shele love thee deare then doe not feare But strike the Iron while tis hott. (Rollins, Garland, 231–32)

When the widow in Jack of Newbury tries to reassure Jack that “maidens fickleness proceedes of vaine fancies, but old womens jealousie of superabounding love” (10), the terms may be more positive, but the link between jealousy and excessive desire remains the same. It is worth considering, then, whether there is more to the notion of the widow as jealous wife than the commonsense assumption that an older woman will naturally be suspicious of younger, more attractive rivals: namely, whether the image of the widow’s voracious sexual appetite, deployed to assuage male anxieties over authority, in fact carries within it the seeds of another anxiety which blossoms after marriage. Having bolstered his threatened masculinity by fantasizing the widow’s lustfulness, the suitor, now a husband, is left with the equally emasculating afterimage of that fantasy, a potentially insatiable wife. Formerly in the pleasing position of seeing her desires open to his advantage, he assumes the marital burden of having not only to satisfy those desires and so to guard against jealousy but also to constrain and police them so as to guard against something far worse – cuckoldry. The obsession with cuckoldry among early modern men is too well-known and widely documented to need much rehearsal here; cuckoldry anxiety was, as Breitenberg points out, the “singularly most dreadful exhibition” of anxious masculinity in the period, the result of “an economy that constructs masculine identity as dependent on the coercive and symbolic regulation of women’s sexuality” (175). Of course, fear of being cuckolded was the lot of any married man, but the pre-marital fantasy of the widow’s voracious desire seems to have exacerbated it.

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Such is the subtext of a richly ambiguous ballad titled “Nobody his Counsaile to Chuse a Wife: Or, the Difference betweene Widdowes and Maydes” (c. 1622). The ballad is ostensibly a list of reasons why widows make better wives than maidens do, but the title itself alerts one to look for hints that these reasons are not to be taken at face value. The method of comparison is simple: one stanza describes the difficulties of marrying a maid, and the next explains why marrying a widow avoids these problems. On the surface, the ballad presents the basic elements of the lusty widow fantasy: widows, who are eager to marry for sexual pleasure, provide a man with a functioning, expense-free household. But into its praise of how little a widow will require from her husband for childbed expenses, there creeps a sly, punning reminder that the remarried wife is sexually used goods, with the appetite that such goods usually have: He that deales with a Widdow, hath these [articles needed for childbirth] at command: He takes a commodity broke to his hand, He neede not stand carking, for linnen nor Cradle: If he bestow getting, to keepe it shees able: She seldome will pray her Husband to pay: If he bestow night worke, then sheele bestow day. (Rollins, Garland, 266, my italics)

A little later, this hint is developed further, in a stanza that starts out innocently enough with housekeeping and ends up, with dark insinuations, in the bedroom: A Widdow will alwayes, looke well to her home: Let him do his businesse or let it alone, Sheele buy what is needfull to serve her owne use: In words she will never her husband abuse Abroad she is kinde, in bed he shall finde: A woman that strive will, to pleasure his mind. (268)

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Eric Partridge’s dictionary of Shakespearean bawdy glosses sexual meanings for “business,” “serve,” “use,” “abuse” (“To make a cuckold of; to wrong by infidelity”), and “strive.” No matter how a husband tries to do his “businesse” (that is, to please his wife sexually), reads the subtext of doubleentendres, the widow may use her wealth to get what she feels she needs in the way of sexual services from other men to “serve” her “use.” She thus will not “abuse” her husband in words but in deeds; that is, she will cuckold him. The next two lines convey their implication by teasingly appearing to contain an enjambment: “Abroad she is kinde in bed, he shall finde.” And presumably, she will do her best to “pleasure his mind” by appearing to be faithful. The ballad’s refrain is similarly equivocal, suggesting one thing as a refrain to the earlier stanzas about wooing and yielding, but another when it follows the stanzas which describe the widow as wife: For Maydens are wanton and often times coy: But Widdowes be wilfull and never say nay. (264)

That which is a boon to the suitor becomes a curse to the husband: the widow who “willfully” accepts a suitor on the basis of sexual criteria, is likely to be a “willful” (lustful, headstrong) wife who “never says nay” to the improper advances of anyone. As Niccholes commiserates in A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (1615), “the best is, though the worse for thee, they [widows] are navigable without difficulty, more passable than Virginia, and lye at an easier Rode, as unsatiate as the sea, or rather the grave” (25). It is not coincidental, perhaps, that “Nobody his Counsaile to Chuse a Wife” is sung to the tune of “The Wanton Wife of Westminster” (Rollins, Garland, 263). Jealousy, insatiability, and the threat of cuckoldry are the undercurrents of the little drama of wifely insubordination that closes the first chapter of Jack of Newbury. While the widow’s desirousness enables Jack to lay aside his reservations about marrying a potentially domineering wife and to move into his master’s place, he is not immediately able to enjoy that position in peace. For the widow, whose first decisive action to win Jack for her husband had been spurred by her “inward jealousie” at seeing him kissed by a younger woman (14), fears that “so lustie a young man as he would never love her being so ancient.” She therefore launches a sort of preemptive strike: before Jack can neglect her, she resolves to “take him downe in his wedding shooes,” neglecting him and her household by gadding

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about from morning to night “among her gossips and acquaintance to make merrie.” When Jack admonishes her about it, she responds in true widow’s fashion: The day hath beene when I might have gone forth when I would, and come in againe when it had pleased me without controulement: and now I must bee subject to every Jacke’s checke. I am sure (quoth she) that by my gadding abroad, and carelesse spending I waste no goods of thine. I pittying thy povertie, made thee a man, and maister of the house, but not to the end I woulde become thy slave. (22)

Having “made him a man,” she now shows him exactly how much his manhood is still in her power. Although we are never told what the widow gets up to when she goes out, “gadding abroad” and insubordination are traditionally associated with adultery. The man who could not make his wife obey was conventionally assumed to be a cuckold as well (Underdown, 127), and the wife’s breach of the boundaries of the home was equally conventionally linked, at least in theory, to her breach of chastity. After the marriage, the potential sexual implications of the widow’s “gadding” surface on the night she returns home at midnight to find that Jack has locked her out, and he insinuates that she is a whore: What, is it you that keepes such a knocking? I pray you get hence and request the Constable to provide you a bed, for this night you shall have no lodging heere. I hope quoth shee, you will not shut me out of doores like a dogge, or let me lie in the streetes like a strumpet. Whether like a dogge or drab, quoth hee, all is one to mee, knowing no reason but that as you have stayed out all day for your delight, so you may lie foorth all night for my pleasure. (23)

Even under these circumstances, though, the widow manages to keep the upper hand. After luring Jack outside with a show of submission, she locks him out, scolds him for having lectured her, and forces him to “go to bed to [his] fellowes” the apprentices, putting him, quite literally, in his place. The couple reaches a truce the next morning, but despite the assurance that they then “lived long together, in most godly, loving and kind sort,” the truce seems to be very much on her terms. Jack, exasperated and defeated, decides to “leave [her] to [her] own wilfulness,” which elicits the following satisfied response: “seeing yee have sworne to give mee my will, I vowe likewise that my wilfulnesse shall not offend you” (24–25). This resolution, with its echo of the Wife of Bath’s tale, does not detract much from the widow’s control.

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At this point, Leggatt’s description of Jack of Newbury as a “fantasy of wish-fulfillment” may seem downright odd. It would seem that however a widow’s sexual appetite may temporarily neutralize her threat to her suitor’s masculinity, that threat returns after marriage with a vengeance. But Deloney does indeed offer marriage to a lustful widow as a fantasy to his readers, with the magic words that conclude his chapter and provide the epigraph to mine: “in the end she died, leaving her husband wondrous wealthie” (25). The end of chapter 1 and the end of the widow are merely the beginning for Jack. The deeds of bravery, generosity, and public spirit which win the admiration of his fellow citizens and his king proceed to unfold in the ten chapters of his story which follow. Here, Jack has a new wife at his side, one of his own maidservants. The story of their wedding, with its emphasis on the maid’s parents’ consent and Jack’s generosity in making her the mistress of such a wealthy, thriving household, effectively re-orders the domestic hierarchy which his first marriage had inverted. Chapter 2 also opens with a glorious description, partly in verse, of Jack’s “great houshold and familie” (28): hundreds of merry, orderly, well-fed workers industriously weaving and spinning and filling his warehouses with valuable cloth. All this is Jack’s, courtesy of the widow, who is never mentioned again. If marrying a wealthy widow is a fantasy fraught with anxiety, the ultimate fantasy may be obtaining a widow’s wealth without having to keep the widow. What lurks as a subtext in the first chapter of Jack of Newbury – the fears of insatiability and cuckoldry that shadow the “lusty widow,” the urge to profit from her and then dispatch her – becomes explicit in Middleton’s 1604 comedy, The Phoenix. The first “abuse” which comes to the reforming hand of Prince Phoenix (a figure based on the traditional motif of the disguised ruler) is the disintegrating marriage of Castiza and the Captain, mother and step-father of Phoenix’s faithful servant Fidelio. Castiza is a remarried widow, evidently middle-aged (her son is a grown man) despite her maidenly-sounding name; the Captain, her second husband, is one of the play’s numerous comic villains, and is introduced as a roistering libertine repenting his ill-judged decision to take the widow as his wife. Having given up his swashbucklingly masculine occupation as a privateer to live on his wife’s money, he chafes at the constraints of his new domestic role and longs to return to the seas for a life of wenching and pillaging. Castiza is “not greatly rich” (1.2.67), but the Captain’s main goal in marrying was not to obtain money for its own sake but, ludicrously enough, to have sex without the expense of a whore. Evidently of a genetically randy disposition, he blames his father for having been “too ruttish to let me thrive under

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him,” leaving no funds for his like-minded son to “bath[e] in sensuality.” The Captain thus falls prey to a fit of “lustful passion,” and foolishly winds up “shackled with a wife” (1.2.40–67). The plot begins shortly after this marriage, when the Captain’s old privateering companions come to him boasting of the “admirable purchase” (1.2.2) they are about to seize from three ships on their next voyage, and commiserating the fact that he must now remain at home, “tied e’en as the devil would ha’t” (1.2.10–11); the oath of one of his companions, who swears “upon [his] manhood” (1.2.9) about the bounty of the ships they are going to plunder, neatly encapsulates just what it is the Captain has given up. The Captain’s disgust at his new, emasculating occupation of “husband” becomes evident when Castiza enters, addressing him as “Captain, my husband” (1.2.68), and he turns on her with “’Slife, call me husband again and I’ll play the captain and beat you” (1.2.69–70): rejecting the title which defines him as a man “tied” to domesticity and dependent on his wife for money, he asserts himself as a “captain” and threatens to back it up with the overcompensating masculinity of physical violence. Although Castiza is justified in her response, the stereotypical image of the remarried widow who assumes herself superior to her less-wealthy husband places her speech on a fine line between a reasonable plea for better treatment, and a widow’s conventionally shrewish tendency to throw her husband’s dependent status in his teeth, reminding him of the “respect” he owes her for accepting him in his poverty: How comes it that you are so opposite To love and kindness? I deserve more respect, But that you please to be forgetful of it. For love to you did I neglect my state, Chide better fortunes from me, Gave the world talk, laid all my friends at waste. (1.2.74–79)1

The Captain’s retort – “The more fool you” (1.2.80) – may well elicit a laugh at Castiza’s expense, if only for the reason that the audience, who see nothing worth loving in the Captain, are likely to have been silently formulating the same thought since the beginning of the scene. The Captain is determined to escape from the bonds of married life and run away to sea, but he finds himself in a double bind: as he sees it, the alternative to remaining tamely at home, domesticated into a widow’s husband, involves laying himself open to the even more emasculating position of a cuckold:

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And I to play the artificer and marry: to have my wife dance at home, and my ship at sea, and both take in salt water together! . . . That a man is in danger every minute to be cast away, without he have an extraordinary pilot that can perform more than a man can do! And to say truth, too, when I’m abroad, what can I do at home? No man living can reach so far: and what a horrible thing ’twould be to have horns brought me at sea, to look as if the devil were i’ th’ ship! And all the great tempests would be thought of my raising; to be the general curse of all merchants; And yet they likely are as deep in as myself, and that’s a comfort. Oh, that a captain should live to be married! (1.2.27–52)

A few lines later, the Captain demands of his wife: Why didst thou marry me? You think, as most of your insatiate widows, That captains can do wonders; when, ’las The name does often prove the better man (1.2.86–89)

Although Castiza will later be proven steadfastly faithful to her undeserving husband, at this point the Captain’s anxiety does not seem entirely unreasonable. In fact, his wife’s response to the label of “insatiate widow” works only to exacerbate it, implying that her expectations of his virility have indeed been disappointed: “That which you urge should rather give me cause / To repent than yourself ” (1.2.90–91). Elsewhere, Phoenix himself suggests Castiza’s lustful motivation in marrying the Captain, remarking “Indeed, she was a beast / To marry him; and so he makes of her” (1.4.274– 75). It would seem that no matter how virtuous and respectable a remarried widow might be, her previous sexual experience ensures that the specter of cuckoldry hovers a little closer to her husband than it does to other married men. The precarious reputation of the second husband which plagues Middleton’s Captain evidently had a certain amount of cultural currency: it was available, at any rate, to the men who showed up one August night in 1600 to torment and humiliate Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby. Hoby, a justice of the peace in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and a zealous Protestant, fell afoul of some of the leading families in his predominantly Catholic district by taking part in commissions against recusancy and otherwise working to undermine their long-entrenched influence. In revenge, a group of youths from these families enacted what Felicity Heal describes as a “charivari,” a “ritual humiliation” (169) with the object of “so dishonouring [Hoby] in the face of local society that he would be forced to retreat from the public stage” (170). Claiming the right to Hoby’s hospitality after a

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hunting trip, the young men proceeded to disrupt his household and make mock of his authority: getting drunk, playing cards, destroying property, deliberately interrupting family prayers, and – inevitably – compounding such injury with sexual insult. As Heal notes, Hoby was an easy target, for “[h]e and his wife were childless after four years of marriage; he had married an heiress and come north with no fortune of his own to assert authority over her; and he had a puny physique.” But Hoby’s wife, the former Margaret Devereux, n´ee Dakins, was a remarried widow as well as an heiress, and the manor they inhabited, Hackness, was hers from her late husband. Accordingly, Hoby’s tormentors not only mocked his lack of virility (calling him “a spyndle shanked ape” who “useth to draw up his Breeches with a shooing-horn”) and implied that they would cuckold him (wishing aloud that the stags’ horns on his wall “were as hard nailed or as hard fastened upon Sir Thomas his heade”), but gave a certain edge to their insinuations by reminding him that another man had already had sexual possession of his wife: one of the gang, William Eure, threatened Hoby that he would “play young Devereux” (171–72). While not going so far as to call Margaret an “insatiate widow,” the taunt suggested that the lady might not refuse a repeat performance of her younger, more attractive first husband. When as circumspect a couple as Sir Thomas and Margaret Hoby were subject to slurs of this nature, the Captain’s fears about the chaste Castiza are recognizable as more than a villainous idiosyncrasy. The Captain is lured back to his old life not just by the promise of booty and excitement, but by its reassuring pattern of sexual relations. Offering him “more women, more common, pretty sweethearts, than ever any age could boast of” (1.2.25–26), his privateering companions describe the ideal situation enjoyed by his lieutenant, who goes one better than keeping a whore and has a whore keep him. “How?” admires the Captain, “Is there any such fortunate man breathing? And I so miserable to live honest! I envy thee, lieutenant, I envy thee, that thou are such a happy knave” (1.2.33–35). Being kept by a whore provides a man with financial maintenance, sexual satisfaction, the gratifying knowledge that a woman wants his virility enough to pay for it, and – despite her promiscuity – no risk of being cuckolded. This agreeable set-up is dramatized in detail later in the play by the Knight and the Jeweller’s Wife: he provides “Pleasure” and she provides “Revenue” (these are, in fact, their nicknames for each other). The exchange of pleasure for revenue bears a close resemblance to the fantasy of winning a rich widow by appealing to her sexual appetite, but the Captain has discovered how this fantasy can destroy itself. Once marriage is added to the equation of

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having a woman pay for one’s sexual services, the specters of insatiability and cuckoldry rear their heads. Having married a lusty widow, the Captain is now plagued by the fear that he will prove sexually inadequate, whether at home, where “the name does often prove the better man” (1.2.89), or at sea, where he would need a truly “extraordinary pilot” to satisfy his distant wife. The Captain makes no bones about his urge to rid himself of Castiza. He cruelly tells her to go hang herself and “make a widower” of him (1.2.73), then briefly considers whether he might poison her and “purge [his] fault at sea” (1.2.143–44). Ultimately, he takes counsel with another of the play’s villains, the mad law-client Tangle, and lights on the solution of selling his wife to the traitorous Lord Proditor before he heads off to sea. The sale marks the Captain’s return to his lost occupation in more ways than one. Not only is it intended to provide him with five hundred pounds to finance his new voyage, but it also mirrors the privateers’ method of making money by profiting from the sale of seized goods. Rather than being obliged to “respect” a wife who is clearly aware of her generosity in having married him, he turns the tables of power and claims her as his legal property, insisting that “I sell none but mine own” (2.2.281). The Captain is clearly back in his element as he praises his merchandise to Proditor – “You have brought as lovely a pennyworth, my lord, as e’er you bought in your life” (2.2.111– 12) – cracks bawdy jokes, and counts his money. Through selling Castiza to another man, the Captain also paradoxically ensures that he will not suffer the emasculation of being cuckolded. The sale is explicitly sexual – “For re-entries,” jokes the Captain, “I will not swear for her” (2.2.139) – but in taking the active role of merchant or bawd and forcing his will upon Castiza, the Captain repudiates the role of the passive, subordinate cuckold who cannot control his wife.2 Accordingly, no one – not Phoenix and Fidelio in their moral outrage, not Tangle in his descriptions of wifeselling, not even Proditor in his final sneer at the Captain as a “baser slave” (2.2.229) – suggests that in selling his wife the Captain cuckolds himself. In the corrupt society of the play, there is even legal precedent for his actions: Tangle informs the startled Phoenix that “Pistor, a baker, sold his wife t’other day to a cheesemonger . . . another to a cofferer; a third to a common player: why, you see ’tis common” (1.4.252–54). By acting on the male prerogative to treat his wife as a chattel, the Captain reasserts the masculinity his marriage had threatened. The sale, of course, does not go exactly as the Captain had hoped, for Phoenix and Fidelio infiltrate it (the latter, disguised as a scrivener, draws up the lengthy, punning bill of sale for his mother), denounce the Captain, and

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send him packing without his five hundred pounds. Phoenix hyperbolically announces the Captain’s departure as “the bane of brightness fled; / Who sought the death of honor is struck dead” (2.2.338–39), terms which in fact aptly describe how most of the play’s critics have seen the dynamics of this plot. As The Phoenix is a play with an obvious moral framework – Dessen describes it as a morality play superimposed with “the realistic or ‘literal’ surface that we expect in Jacobean comedy” (“Allegorical,” 292) – the Captain and Castiza tend to be read in allegorical black and white. The fact that the Captain is apparently a caricature of the playwright’s troublesome stepfather, Thomas Harvey – a self-described “captayne” who borrowed money of his wife to finance his sea-voyages, and was once accused of attempting to poison her – is assumed to support a reading of the plot as seriously demonizing the Captain and idealizing his wife, who represents Middleton’s recently deceased mother.3 But quite apart from the question of whether Middleton would have been likely to immortalize his shrewd, managing mother and litigious stepfather in a simple pattern of evil oppressing purity, an understanding of the conventional dilemma of being married to a widow illuminates the Captain as a character likely to evoke as much amusement as condemnation from a contemporary audience. It is hard to deny a touch of filial wish-fulfillment in the scene where Fidelio and Phoenix interrupt the sale: having complained before that “that marriage knew nothing of my mind, / It never flourish’d in any part of my affection” (1.1.159–60), Fidelio’s rescue of his mother now compensates for his earlier inability to intervene in her decision to give herself to the Captain. Furthermore, Phoenix prevents Castiza from a re-enactment of her original mistake: when the Captain begs her for a few crowns to take to sea with him out of the proceeds of her sale, she responds “I give it freely all” (2.2.333). Castiza, who calls her husband “My dear, sweet Captain” (2.2.294) even after he has sold her, is evidently still too prone to let her attraction to the man open her purse to him, a fair description of her earlier decision to marry him. Phoenix now chides her in terms that have telling connotations of sexual restraint – “I will contain you, lady” (2.2.334)4 – and makes her keep the money, dismissing the Captain with a few coins. Anne Middleton married Thomas Harvey when her son was a child of six; when Fidelio’s mother remarries, her son is an adult with a powerful friend, and he gets a second chance to intervene in what he could not originally prevent. His reward is Castiza’s repentant thanks to “My kind son, / Whose liking I neglected in this match” (2.2.298–99). But the Captain, too, is rewarded with precisely that which he most desires: the loss of his wife, and his return to the privateering life of

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his bachelor days. Despite its insistent moralizing, the play has at least a moment of covert complicity with the Captain, comically validating his thoroughly amoral viewpoint that the most enviable lot is that of the man who can profit financially and sexually from a woman while evading marriage: toward the end of the action, the Knight, who like the Captain’s lieutenant, is kept by a “wench,” literally turns out to be the most “fortunate man breathing.” Escaping even the scolding which Phoenix metes out to his lover, the Jeweller’s Wife, and evading arrest by his creditors to boot, the Knight gets off scot free at the end of the fourth act, saved by an unknown gentleman who appears without warning, distracts the arresting officers, and exits laughing, never to appear in the play again. The Captain may not be quite as lucky as the Knight, for he must submit to Phoenix’s denunciation, but he in fact enjoys a similar fate. Just as the Knight is denied the hundred and fifty angels he expected to get from his “Revenue,” but maintains his freedom nonetheless, the Captain is given only a few crowns of the five hundred pounds Proditor pays for Castiza, but is sent off to sea, where he desperately wants to be. He thus escapes both his creditors (2.2.10–12) and his marriage, and his last lines are a sigh of relief: “Well, I’m yet glad, I’ve liberty and these; / The land has plagu’d me, and I’ll plague the seas” (2.2.336–37). If The Phoenix explicitly stages the sexual anxieties of the second husband, Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) relies on an audience’s familiarity with these anxieties to produce a subtle note of comic irony in its conclusion. Dame Pliant, a nineteen-year-old widow, functions in the play primarily as a prize – in fact, the only prize of substance to be had in that house of smoke and mirrors – and is the means by which Face pacifies Lovewit and persuades him to overlook the mayhem that his house has hosted in his absence. A minor, slightly sketched figure, the rich young widow is so silent and so lacking in volition that she is more of a prop than a character. Desired first by Drugger, then prostituted to the “Spanish Count” as a substitute for Doll, proposed to by Surly, fought over by Subtle and Face, and finally handed off to Lovewit, she is passed from man to man, her own desirousness assumable only from her passivity and from the others’ descriptions of her as a “soft and buxom widow,” a “delicate dabchick” who “melts like a myrobalane” under Subtle’s kisses (4.2.37, 60, 41–42). She is clearly sexually compliant, if not voracious. In fact, most of the characteristics which generally make a widow threatening to her suitors are here displaced onto Kastril, her brother. He, not she, is quarrelsome, domineering, careful of his money (3.4.48–50), and ambitious that his

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sister should marry a man of rank. Kastril thus supplies what Dame Pliant lacks in dramatic personality and gullibility (for Pliant is so volitionless and stupid, such “a good, dull innocent” (5.4.67) that she is barely worth the trouble of gulling), while leaving her seemingly free from all traits that might make her less than perfectly desirable. All, that is, except her pliancy. There is not really any question of wooing Dame Pliant. After Subtle has assured her that she will marry a Spanish Count (and calmed her one small flicker of willfulness, a patriotic aversion to Spaniards), she is there to be taken by anyone who can get into a Spanish Count’s costume and clap up the match. Unlike most stage widows, she does not have to be stirred and won over with sexual audacity (although a certain amount of sexual speed is essential) but merely seized by whomever has the most wit. Drugger thinks he is being clever by enlisting the aid of cunning-men to get him the widow, but his gullibility ensures that he is never so much as in the same room with her, and he even supplies the Spanish suit in which Lovewit will carry her off. Surly, who is much sharper than Drugger, is wily enough to disguise himself in an effort to expose the rogues, which wins him the opportunity to claim Dame Pliant’s hand. But Surly bungles his opportunity. In a parody of the usual widow-wooer’s speech, where the suitor guarantees his success by offering sexual satisfaction in exchange for the widow’s wealth, Surly expects Dame Pliant to reward him for not having sex with her: And where I might have wronged your honour, and have not, I claim some interest in your love. You are, They say, a widow, rich, and I am a bachelor, Worth nought. Your fortunes may make me a man, As mine ha’ preserved you a woman. Think upon it, And whether I have deserved you or no. (4.6.10–15)

This is no way to win a widow. Surly misses his chance with Dame Pliant because he assumes that her chastity matters; so too does Subtle, who relinquishes his claim to the widow for the same reason, fastidiously refusing to have her if she is to be prostituted to the Spanish Count. As Helen Ostovich points out, however, in the world of The Alchemist, chastity has no value when money hangs in the balance, and the chastity of a widow in particular is about as relevant as that of a whore (41). The right attitude for success is Face’s recognition that prostituting the widow makes it “but one man more” for “There is no maidenhead to be feared or lost” (4.3.66–68).

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Face is all set to climb into the Spanish suit and make his move when he is prevented by Lovewit’s return. Ostensibly, Lovewit enjoys the final triumph, for Face is constrained to hand over the widow as a peace offering to obtain his master’s forgiveness for abusing his house (5.3.83–86). For once, it would appear that youth and wit have been bested for the hand of a widow by age and status, for despite Lovewit’s appreciation of cleverness, he gets Dame Pliant purely because he is in a position of power over Face and not through any trickery of his own invention. Several critics have argued, however, that Face wins his pardon (and his continued possession of the venture’s booty) by fobbing off on his master a prize almost as illusory as Mammon’s stone or Dapper’s gaming fly.5 Their evidence for this view – that Lovewit has entered a January–May marriage in which the husband’s traditional fate of cuckoldry can only be hastened by Dame Pliant’s sexual malleability and Lovewit’s willingness to be “ruled” by his tricky servant – is strengthened when we take the remarried widow’s reputation for insatiability into account: Dame Pliant gives every indication of proving true the ballad refrain, “Widdowes be wilfull and never say nay.” Ironically, it is Lovewit himself who gives us the first hint that Dame Pliant is not only accommodating, but appetitive. He informs Surly that the widow took a dim view of his lack of action: Good faith, now she does blame y’extremely, and says You swore and told her you had ta’en the pains, To dye your beard, and umber o’er your face, Borrowed a suit and ruff, all for her love; And then did nothing. What an oversight And want of putting forward, sir, was this! (5.5.50–55)

Lovewit preens himself on his own performance – “Well fare an old harquebusier yet / Could prime his powder and give fire and hit / All in a twinkling” (5.5.56–58) – but the pride he takes in displaying this youthful sexual prowess in old age merely recalls the unsettling fact that Face, as Wayne A. Rebhorn points out, had marketed Dame Pliant to his master with the same promise he offered the dupes: not only sexual pleasure and wealth, but rejuvenation (369). Her money, in fact, is something of an afterthought, as Face proffers “a widow . . . that you shall gi’ me thanks for, / Will make you seven years younger, and a rich one” (5.3.84–86). But the subtext of Lovewit’s closing speech to the audience is that he has instead

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married a wife who, rather than restoring his manhood, will undermine it with the ignominy of cuckoldry: Therefore, gentlemen And kind spectators, if I have outstripped An old man’s gravity or strict canon, think What a young wife and a good brain may do: Stretch age’s truth sometimes, and crack it too. (5.5.152–56)

Lovewit thinks (as do some critics) that he has found a realistic version of the elixir of youth: his luscious young wife and clever servant will help him “stretch” or even “crack” the unpleasant “truth” of old age.6 But given Dame Pliant’s name and nature – her easy compliance with any man who attempts her, her suspect status as a lusty, remarried widow – the audience would be able to see a meaning in these lines that Lovewit does not intend. What a “young wife” and a “good brain” (be it Face or another would-be adulterer) usually do to an “old man” is cuckold him, “stretching” and “cracking” the aged husband’s “truth,” which is both his credit or reputation, and the fidelity his wife owes him.7 Having swindled the gulls and double-crossed his fellow rogues, Face’s coup de grace is to bribe his master – his final and most important dupe – with a prize of dubious worth. Richard Dutton suggests that Jonson’s equivocal treatment of Dame Pliant in a period and a genre when “the rich, young widow is the epitome of the ‘happy ending’” satirizes simplistic modes of narrative and moral closure: “The real strength of the satire in the play lies in its refusal to accept bland, facile answers, and these include both the concept of the ‘happy ending’ and the suggestion that vice can be eradicated simply by punishing stage-villains” (122). If we accept, however, that the widow-marriages which conclude so many Jacobean comedies are rather more complicated than this explanation allows, Dame Pliant is less the rejection of a formula than its completion, a following through of the lusty-widow fantasy to its logical, bitter end. In the context of The Alchemist, The Phoenix, and Jack of Newbury, the contemporary appeal of a play like The Puritan, or The Widow of Watling Street (1606) becomes apparent. The Puritan, part of The Shakespeare Apocrypha but commonly attributed to Middleton,8 is widely regarded as a seriously flawed play. The problem is with the ending: a pair of city comedy’s typical witty tricksters, George Pyeboord and Captain Idle, are about to marry a rich widow and her daughter, when an unnamed Nobleman appears, deus ex machina, reveals the tricksters as con-men, and hands the

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brides over instead to a pair of wealthy knights, Sir Oliver Muckhill and Sir Andrew Tipstaff, characters as unsympathetic as they are dramatically insignificant. Understandably, critics have complained that this conclusion flies in the face of the traditional comic rewards allotted to youth and wit: Leinwand objects: “The play gets carried away with its elaborate intrigue only to pull up short, to dispose of its protagonist, and to champion the faceless, if respectable, gentlemen endorsed by the play’s nameless ‘Nobleman’” (119); Mark Dominik calls the reversal in the final scene “precipitous and unsatisfying,” a move which “denies the entire thrust of the play up to that point” (45); and Leggatt describes the tricksters’ “defeat” as “simply disappointing” (Citizen Comedy, 74 n.12). The play is only disappointing and unsatisfying, however, if one assumes that marrying the rich widow is indeed “the epitome of the ‘happy ending’” (Dutton, 122); instead, we might take our cue from Pyeboord himself, who at one point declares “Heaven blesse mee from a Widdow, unlesse I were sure to bury her speedily!” (2.1.151–52). As the conventions of comedy forbid the fulfillment of this wish, Pyeboord’s desire to profit from and then dispose of the widow tends to go unremarked. Other kinds of texts, though, are free to indulge in a certain amount of bloodthirsty humor when it comes to getting rid of the remarried widow. All the familiar anxieties are invoked, to be gleefully killed off. In A Juniper Lecture, for instance, a sardonic little rhyme titled “An advice for some” puts a ghoulishly positive spin on Quarlous’s warning against attempting to sexually satisfy a widow: A Widow that is rich and wondrous old, Wooe her, and stew her tender in her gold: If she be cold, a yong mans flame will toast her, Or else his fire of youth will rotten roast her: But let him day and night himselfe apply To please her still, and shee’le the sooner dye. (26)

The main joke of this unsavoury bit of verse is that the advice purports to satisfy both parties: while the widow would be the gratified recipient of exactly what she married for, her young husband would be calculatingly

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hastening the day when the gold would be his with no widow attached. The celebration of precisely such an occasion is included, rather bizarrely, in Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1599). After a number of earnest examples of how to write a letter of condolence, Day offers, without comment, “An Example consolatorie, pleasantly written to one, who had buried his olde wife,” in which the bereaved husband is congratulated on his delivery from “a hateful and verie foule encombrance . . . as wherewith you were continually cloied by the nightlie embracements of so unweldie a carcase.” The letter continues in a jocular vein: . . . bee not sadde I pray thee, wee will finde out a better match wherewith to delghite (sic) thee. Thou must consider that it is requisite that all thinges shoulde bee done with indifferencie, shee hath left a thousande pounde in goodes, and a C. markes by yeare unto thee, let that content thee: what though she was not maried a moneth to thee, thou must be a pacient man, her long continuance with so much wealth might peradventure have glutted thee. The gods have become more favourable to thy young yeares, then thy selfe doest consider of, Shee might I knowe have lived longer time for age, (for foure skore yeares olde I graunt is nothing) the woman also in verie good plight too, by Saint Margerie: but what of that, wee must, as I saide before, beare with necessitie. (125–26)

Swetnam, whose “Bearbaiting of Widows” in the Araignment (1615) dwells at length on the remarried widow’s ungovernability, turns three of his five anecdotes of unhappy marriages into jokes about her demise: the first, concerning a man who refused to go to heaven if his wife was there, begins “One having maried with a widowe, it was his luck to bury her . . .;” the second involves a remarried widow who hangs herself in a fit of irrational jealousy, leading to the punch line “I would . . . that all trees did beare such fruit”; the third tells of a husband on a sea-voyage who throws his widowwife overboard at the captain’s command to lighten the ship, declaring that “he never felt any thing in all his life that was so heavy to him as she had beene” (62–63). Swetnam may be expected to be extreme, but even Gervase Holles, decorously recording his family history, ascribes to his own maternal grandfather a marital plan worthy of the Bearbaiter of Widows himself: in 1578, the twenty-four-year-old John Kingston greeted the news of Catherine Nedham’s widowhood with “his usual oath when he spoke earnestly”: “Body of our Lord! I will go marry this olde widdow and pay my debts. Then when I have buried her will I marry a young wench and get children!” (215). Kingston seems to have suffered from one of youth’s customary misperceptions: Catherine, being no more than “towards forty,” was not exactly at death’s door, and her grandson notes that “she deceaved him in part for shee held him tug above 38 yeares and lived near 12 years

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after him.” One can only guess at what Holles wished to imply by his choice of words: “to hold [someone] tug” means “to keep strenuously occupied, or fully engaged.”9 Once we understand how a similar urge toward escape – albeit less murderously articulated – underlies The Puritan, the “problem” of the ending disappears. The evidence that the play operates in this way goes far beyond Pyeboord’s “heaven blesse me from a Widow, unlesse I were sure to bury her speedily!”; in fact, Pyeboord’s declaration might be thoroughly disingenuous, for he makes it to Lady Plus, the Puritan widow herself, in an effort to deflect her suspicion that he has come as yet another unwanted suitor. But between its presentation of Lady Plus, its explication of the tricksters’ scheme, and its reliance on the narrative structures of its source, The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele (1605),10 The Puritan makes the impending marriages appear less of a prize than a trap. It’s not a play about snaring a widow, but about getting snared by one, and in the end, Pyeboord and Idle are not so much defeated as rescued from being led into unforeseen troubles by a trick that has veered off in a wildly unexpected direction. The play opens with a scene of Lady Plus and her children mourning her newly buried husband, in which her loving description of the control – especially financial control – he had granted her in their marriage gives a fair foretaste of the kind of wife she will make for his successor. Returning from her husband’s funeral, she wails, Oh, out of a million of millions, I should nere finde such a husband; hee was unmatchable, – unmatchable! nothing was to hot, nor to deere for mee, I could not speake of that one thing, that I had not: beside I had keyes of all, kept all, receiv’d all, had money in my purse, spent what I would, went abroad when I would, came home when I would, and did all what I would. Oh, my sweete husband! I shall never have the like. (1.1.105–14)

Significantly, this speech calls to mind the conventional complaint of a widow to her second husband, in which she berates him for not measuring up to her idealized image of the first: “I brought you good meanes, and meanes I will bee allowed,” rants a remarried widow in A Juniper Lecture, before lapsing into a lament for the man she has lost: “Ah, poore husband hee is dead and gone, I shall never forget his kindnesse to mee: hee was the best conditioned man to mee that lived: hee was so kinde and loving that he never came home empty handed to mee, but stil brought me home one knick knacke or other: oh he was the sweetest husband that ever lay by a woman” (47–48). When Lady Plus’s brother-in-law, Sir Godfrey,

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tries to comfort her by assuring her that she will be much sought after by Knights who long “to marry riche widdowes, wealthy Cittizens widdowes, lusty faire-browd Ladies” (1.1.87–88), she vows never to remarry, prompting her elder daughter Frank (less of a character in her own right than a shadow and echo of her mother) to vow lifelong celibacy, and her lascivious younger daughter Moll to grudgingly follow suit. Nevertheless, as soon as the promised knights come to woo her, Lady Plus betrays a widow’s stereotypical carnal urges with an unconscious double entendre that give them good reason to hope for “better comfort” on their next attempt: “O never, never! and I live these thousand yeares! and you bee good Knights, doe not hope; twill be all Vaine, Vayne, – looke you, put off all your suites, and you come to me againe” (2.1.131–35). “Put off all their suites, quatha?” observes her servant, Fraylty, “I, that’s the best wooing of a Widdow, indeed, when a man’s Nonsuted; that is, when he’s a bed with her” (2.1.136–39). Given that she mourns her late husband as “the sweetest husband that ever lay by woman” (1.1.7–8), and “a man so well given to a woman – oh!” (1.1.13– 14), there is little doubt that her desires will soon drive her into a second marriage. Enter the tricksters, George Pyeboord and Captain Idle, who could certainly use Lady Plus’s wealth. Pyeboord is “a poore Gentleman, & a Scholler” who has “turnde to [his] wittes, to shift in the world” after being expelled from Oxford for stealing a cheese (1.2.36, 54–55). Captain Idle is not the braggart soldier his name might imply – that role is filled by a minor character, Corporal Oath – but another amiable rogue who, suffering the enforced “idleness” of unemployment and unable to prosper in a peacetime world where “the tide runs to Bawdes and flatterers” (1.4.23–24), has been arrested while practicing the less hypocritical occupation of a highwayman. As Idle is in danger of hanging, Pyeboord begins to “cast about some happy slight” (1.4.42) to free his friend from prison and to improve both their fortunes; little by little, a plan begins to take shape. According to Leinwand, the ultimate goal of the tricksters’ scheme is marriage: “Pye-boord goes to extraordinary lengths, setting up gullings within gullings to get what he has taken aim at – the widow, Lady Plus, and her daughter Frances” (119). A careful reading of the play, however, reveals that any such assumption about Pyeboord’s intentions can only be an assumption, because at no point before the actual betrothals does either Pyeboord or Idle indicate that he wants to marry anybody. Marriage, however, is what they almost get. What Pyeboord and Idle apparently want to gain from the widow and her family is not a pair of wealthy matches, but a reputation as a conjuring

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and fortune-telling team which they can use to continue their lucrative gullings indefinitely. A brief outline of the tricksters’ elaborate scheme will help to clarify the relatively minor role that marriage is intended to play in it. Pyeboord has overheard Lady Plus and her daughters making their vows, and even before he teams up with Idle, he begins to hatch the idea for a confidence game in which he will pose as a fortune-teller and use his seemingly supernatural knowledge of their intentions to win their belief and trust. He originally intends to take Skirmish along with him to pose as a conjurer, but, on learning that his friend Idle is in prison and that Idle’s foolish cousin Nicholas can be used as a link to the Plus family, he refines the scheme in order to procure Idle his release and a share in the profits. As it is carried out, the gulling has two distinct phases. In the first phase, Pyeboord goes to the widow and her daughters claiming to be a fortuneteller, and makes three predictions. The first is designed to make himself instantly credible: from having overheard their conversation, he knows that the widow and Frank have vowed never to take husbands, that Moll plans to marry speedily, and that the widow’s late husband was a dishonest man who “would deceave all the world to get riches” (1.1.52–53). From this knowledge he concocts a “prediction” that the dead man will suffer for his sins in purgatory unless the three woman reverse their decisions. The second prediction works to strengthen his newfound credibility: he predicts that Lady Plus and Frank will run mad and that Moll will be struck dumb unless a man is killed that day before their door. Of course, Pyeboord has arranged for a fake killing, and even has plans to win himself a greater name by resurrecting the “corpse” at a later date. The third prediction, linking this gulling to the second phase, which will bring in Idle as a conjurer, is that Sir Godfrey will suffer a loss. By the time Nicholas hides Sir Godfrey’s gold chain, Skirmish has already stabbed Oath before the family’s door and the widow’s faith in the “fortune teller” is complete, allowing the second phase to get under way. Sir Godfrey bails Idle, the “conjurer,” out of prison so that he can conjure to find his chain, and with a little help from a timely thunderstorm, Idle and Pyeboord work in tandem for a hilarious scene of raising the devil in the Plus family’s dining-room. The chain duly reappears, earning the men forty angels and the utmost trust of the whole family. The rogues also get something that does not seem to have been in the original plan. The widow is taken with the thought of marrying “a man a cunning” (the word is doubtlessly used with a bawdy quibble) from the first time she hears of Captain Idle as “a wondrous rare fellow . . . very strongly made upward” (4.2.15, 7–8). Perhaps Sir Godfrey’s praise of his conjuring – “oh

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cunning, cunning!” (4.2.296) – stirs up her inclinations again after the Captain has performed his trick, for she suddenly announces: Well, seeing my fortune tels mee I must marry, let me marry a man of witte, a man of parts. Here’s a worthy Captaine, and ’tis a fine Title truely la to bee a Captaines wife. A Captaines Wife, it goes very finely; beside all the world knows that a worthy Captaine is a fitte Companion to any Lord, then why not a sweete bed-fellow for any lady, – Ile have it so. (4.2.297–305)

The likelihood of sexual puns on “witte”/ “whit” and “parts,” together with the reputation of captains for superior performance as bed-fellows – as Castiza’s husband testifies – suggests that Lady Plus chooses a husband for a widow’s usual sexual reasons and that her “fortune” has merely liberated her desires. And as she makes this declaration to the Captain’s face, her last remark – “Ile have it so” – drives home the point that this is less of an offer than a willful, peremptory seizure of what she wants, highly suggestive of her already-indicated taste for domestic mastery. Idle has neither wooed the widow nor proposed to her, and his non-verbal reaction to his sudden appropriation by her would be determined by the performer, since in the text he is simply speechless. A few lines later Pyeboord has almost as little to say when Frank follows her mother’s cue and, without provocation, declares “I love you deerely, and could wish my best part yours” (4.3.27– 28). Pyeboord, who replies in surprise “Love you me? then for your sweet sake Ile doo’t” (4.3.29–30), has the better deal, but Idle’s fate may well recall his friend’s earlier pronoucement that a widow is better buried than married; nor is it likely a coincidence that the widow’s speech claiming the Captain for her husband is interrupted by the sudden entrance of Fraylty, announcing that he has seen two men pass by, “one going to burying, & another going to hanging” (4.2.309–10). Marriage to a widow can be jokingly implied to be the equivalent to burying and hanging only in a play which does not offer her as a reward to youth and wit in the conventional fantasy of marrying her for her money. If The Puritan were to make it explicit that Pyeboord and Idle were scheming toward marriage – and the typical widow-hunting plot makes the suitors’ intentions very explicit – a spectator who wondered whether the tricksters were better off without the prize they sought would have to do so against the thrust of the play. As it stands, however, the audience simply has little reason to think that the men have been working toward this goal. It is possible to assume that when Pyeboord wins his credibility by playing on the women’s vows and telling them they must marry quickly, he means to suggest that they should marry him and his friend, but this oblique hint is as far as it

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goes. Not only is there no courtship (which might conceivably be explained as the tricksters’ way of avoiding the women’s suspicion of suitors), but of all the times that Pyeboord carefully explains his plans to the audience or to other characters, not once does he mention marriage. He has three speeches in particular where he might be expected to say that he and Idle will aim for a pair of wealthy wives. The first is his long soliloquy directly after he has told the widow her fortune, but here he merely describes how he had “laid the hole of mine eare to a hole in the wall, and heard ’em make these vowes, & speake those words upon which I wrought these advantages” (2.1.331–34), adds how he has planned for Skirmish to stab Oath to confirm his “fortunes,” and suggests that he means to use his new reputation as a fortune-teller and a raiser of the dead to embark on a lucrative new career: “so shall I get my selfe into a most admired opinion and under the pretext of that cunning, beguile as I see occasion” (2.1.351–53). Pyeboord is not very specific about what his further “beguilings” may entail or whether he seeks to obtain an “admired opinion” beyond the Plus household; possibly he means to take his trade of conjuring for “lost” objects among the widow’s neighbors. He also has a second, short soliloquy after the stabbing takes place, but in it he merely reiterates his desire to win the widow’s credulity, not her hand or her daughter’s hand in marriage: “The amazd widdow / Will plant me strongly now in her beleefe, / And wonder at the vertue of my words” (3.1.72–74). And finally, he explains to Captain Idle the benefits the Captain can reap from entering the scheme as a conjurer: to “cheate within doores” (3.5.60–61) is a safer way of stealing than highway robbery, and will make him a “Commander of rich fooles” (3.5.55) able to “geld fooles of more money in one night, then your false tailde Gelding will purchase in a twelve-moneths running” (3.5.61–64). While any of these expressions might vaguely describe tricking a rich widow into marriage, there is simply no reason for Pyeboord to resort to such subtle circumlocutions with Idle if such is his intent. Once again, the main implication of his speech is that he and Idle will go into business together. Settling down with the widow and her daughter does not seem to be on the agenda for the tricksters; a career as fraudulent cunning-men does, and the Plus family is merely a convenient target because of their “naturall simplicitie which will easily swallow an abuse, if any covering be over it” (2.1.336–37). Although marriage is a traditional reward for the hero or heroes of a comedy, it is almost always a marriage which he himself actively seeks. When marriage is thrust upon him, it may justly be suspected as something other than a prize.

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In the end, of course, Captain Idle and Pyeboord do not settle down with Lady Plus and Frank, for the rich knights learn the truth from Oath and Skirmish. The two soldiers are justifiably disgruntled at having been used as “properties” for their co-conspirators’ advancement (5.3.9), Pyeboord having kept them in the dark about the fact that their role in the scheme would involve real wounds, potions that produce the appearance of death, temporary imprisonment, and a genuine threat of execution. Perhaps fearing their own credibility with Lady Plus, the knights employ a nobleman to expose the fraud, confident that “what such a man utters will be thought effectuall and to waighty purpose” (5.3.30–32). The nobleman is intended to discredit the tricksters before the widow and “make ’em loathsome” (5.3.14–15), but although he sets himself up as a moral authority, the play makes it difficult to see him as anything but a hired mouthpiece for the self-serving ends of Sir Oliver Muckhill and Sir Andrew Tipstaff. Had the nobleman been meant to stand as a moral commentator on the preceding action, there would be little purpose in giving Muckhill such a pointed speech detailing his power over the man (5.3.16–33). Moreover, the speech in which this hireling castigates the widow for her choice of husband emphasizes the willfulness and waywardness of widows to the effect of pointing up Lady Plus’s undesirability as a wife. It is, he informs her, “the blind besotting in the state of an unheaded woman thats a widdow” to hate those that honestly and carefully love you, to the maintenance of credit, state, and posterity, and strongly to doat on those, that only love you to undo you: who regard you least are best regarded, who hate you most are best beloved. And if there be but one man among tenne thousand millions of men that is accurst, disastrous, and evilly planeted, whome Fortune beates most, whom God hates most, and all Societies esteeme least, that man is suere to be a husband. – Such is the peevish Moone that rules your bloods. (5.4.8–23)

Rather than being allowed to make a potentially unmanageable wife for a man who is her social and financial inferior, the widow is married off to a rich knight who will look after her “credit, state, and posterity.” That the marriage between Muckhill and the widow may be one in which the traditional domestic hierarchy is upheld is suggested by the nobleman’s closing speech, where he tells the women “Come, enter into your Joyes, you shall not want / For fathers now” (5.4.125–26); as the speech is primarily addressed to the widow, and as “fathers” is plural, the implication is that the widow as well as her children are being re-placed under patriarchal control.

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However, it may also be safe to say that the audience simply does not care whether Muckhill, a minor and thoroughly uninteresting character, ends up with a wife who is likely to be both foolish and domineering. While this unexpected denouement would constitute a failed comic ending in a play which offers the fantasy of a widow as a reward for a penniless but audacious young man, The Puritan instead allows for an ending which undercuts the conventional fifth-act marriages of comedy by juxtaposing their closure with the movement toward open-ended freedom found in the play’s jest-book source. The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele is what David Horne terms a “jest-biography” (115), a sequence of comic anecdotes relating how a single protagonist tricks an array of people to obtain money, clothing, food, or other material goods. As the structure of the jest-book requires that the trickster must be both continually needy and continually free to practice new tricks, each jest moves not toward closure but toward escape.11 In The Merrie Conceited Jests, Peele does not scheme to be set up for life, but merely to satisfy his present needs – a tavern bill, a few nights’ lodging, a pound or two in cash – and once he has obtained his goal, he typically flees, leaving his bridges to burn after him when his victims discover they have been gulled. For example, in one of the book’s simplest jests, “How George Peele served halfe a score Citizens,” he invites the citizens to supper at a tavern, and when they call for the reckoning, he tells them he has paid it all already. They, “being men of good fashion, by no meanes will yield unto it, but every man throws down his money, some ten shillings, some five, some more; protesting, something they will pay” (396). Peele then scoops up the money and slips out while the others are dancing, leaving them with the bill to pay over again. The trickster’s plots do not always proceed without mishap – in another jest, he is deserted by the friend who has helped him pawn his clothing and the furniture out of the chamber where he is staying at an inn, is left trapped nearly naked in an empty room, and is obliged to sneak out in part of the room’s d´ecor, a suit of armor (399–400) – but he always accomplishes his immediate ends and escapes to move on to his next victim. The jest-book pattern of need, trick, and escape appears in the play in its traditional form in the self-contained incidents of act three, scenes three and four: Pyeboord is arrested for a debt to his innkeeper, convinces the officers he is about to collect five pounds for a device for a masque, talks his way into a gentleman’s house and then persuades the gentleman, supposedly the buyer of this device, to let him escape out the back door.12 Although the drawn-out complications of the main action make its adherence to the jest-book pattern less readily apparent, it too can be usefully seen as a cycle of need, trick, and escape, with the added irony that the audience

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may be more aware than the tricksters of just what it is they have avoided. Pyeboord and Idle are clearly disappointed at having their brides taken away from them in the final scene, and a certain amount of disappointment is in fact fitting punishment for their thoroughly callous treatment of Oath and Skirmish. The license of a trickster does not quite extend to declaring one’s collaborators, as Pyeboord does, “emptie creatures . . . but ordaind / As instruments for me to worke upon” (3.1.77–79).13 But the loss of Lady Plus and her daughter is no more than a slap on the wrist, the equivalent of Peele’s discomfiture in the empty inn-room, for the preceding revelations of the widow’s character and her method of selecting a husband have made the audience suspect that what now appears to be a defeat may in fact be the ultimate escape. The two rogues have made a respectable sum of money from their venture; Captain Idle has been bailed out of prison, Pyeboord has evaded his creditors, and in the end, both men are prevented from stumbling into the closure of a dubious marriage, instead preserving the continued freedom of the jest-book trickster. By the time that Richard Brome wrote The Northern Lasse in 1629, the rich widow could be presented straightforwardly as a grave marital mistake from which to flee at any cost. The main plot of The Northern Lasse concerns the dilemma of the aptly named Sir Philip Lucklesse: when the play begins, Lucklesse already regards his betrothal to the “City Widow,” Mistress Fitchow, with a certain ambivalence, but hastens into marriage with her when it appears that Constance Hold-up, a whore from his past, intends to claim him as her husband. Once married, he discovers to his dismay that the “Constance” who longs for him is in fact Constance the Northern Lass, an innocent, well-dowered, and altogether delightful young virgin from the country, who naively believes herself contracted to him on the basis of a few compliments he once paid her. Making no attempt to hide his disappointment from his new wife, Lucklesse spends the rest of the play scheming – with ultimate success – to divorce the widow and marry the maid. The plot would be more cruel than comic if the play itself were not so merciless to Widow Fitchow. Even Lucklesse’s conventional marital taxonomy of whore<widow<maid is soon overturned: the dreaded Constance Hold-up proves to be a surprisingly sympathetic character, resourceful and clear-sighted, but Fitchow, whose name suggests a kind of vicious sexual voracity, is simply terrifying.14 A running joke at the start of the play figures her as an “adventure” (1.1.7), a “great and doubtful undertaking” (1.2.111–12): when Sir Philip summons her to church to be married, his

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messenger announces “your knight is ready prest on his adventures . . . and tis onley you, that hee seekes to incounter,” prompting her dimwitted brother Widgine to explain: “There’s a jest now: but she understands it not. He makes her an Infidell, a wild beast or a Monster, by that word Incounter; what doe Knights adventures incounter else?” (2.1.22–27). Echoing Jonson’s Quarlous, Sir Philip’s wise friend Tridewell points out the sexual and financial dangers in “incountering” a woman who “for her yeares might be your mother” and who “has been the Towne widow these three yeares”: “Never looke to bee the better for her Riches: Shee’ll consume yours and you too: though your backe were Herculean; and lay you in your grave, or in Bedlem (my life on’t) before she can dreame o’ dying, though it be all that you can hope, or pray for, after Mariage” (1.1.8–23). Fitchow more than lives up to her advance billing. The double entendres of her first speech, in which she refuses to give Sir Philip his title, lend the widow’s customary disrespect towards her second husband a potentially adulterous edge: Ladies doe not call their husbands, as they are Knights: as sir Phillip, sir Timothy, or sir Gregory. Did you ever hear my Lady Squelch call her husband Sir Paul. No. But Master Squelch. Indeed all others must sir them by their Christen names; because they are Knights, and to bee knowne from other men: onely their wives must master them, by their Sirnames; because they are Ladies, and will not know them from other men. (1.6.4–11)

This dubious beginning is followed up with a long soliloquy, worth quoting in full as the period’s most thorough compendium of male anxieties concerning the remarried widow as wife: Imprimis, To have the whole sway of the house; and all domesticall affaires; as of accounts of houshold chardges, placing and displacing of all servants in generall; To have free liberty, to goe on all my visits; and though my knights occasions bee never so urgent, and mine of no moment, yet to take from him the command of his Coach; To be in speciall fee with his best trusted servant; nor to let one live with him, that will not bewray all his counsells to mee. To study and practise the Art of jealousie; To faine anger, melancholly, or sicknesse, to the life. These are arts that women must be well practis’d in, ere they can attaine to wisedome, and ought to be the onely study of a widow, from the death of her first husband to the second: From the second to the third, matters of deeper moment; From the third to the fourth deeper yet; and so proportionably to the seaventh, if shee be so long blest with life: But of these I may find time hereafter to consider in order as they fall. Besides, in all, to be singular in our will; to raigne, governe, ordaine lawes and breake ’hem; make quarrells and maintaine ’hem; professe truthes, devise

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falshoods; protest obedience, but study nothing more then to make our husbands so; Controle, controvert, contradict, and be contrary to all conformity: To which end wee must be sure to be arm’d alwayes with prick and praise of the deceased; and cary the Inventory of our goods, and the grosse summe of our Dowry perpetually in our mouthes. Then dos a husband tickle the spleene of a woman, when shee can anger him to please him; chide him to kisse him; Mad him to humble him; make him stiffe-necked to supple him; and hard-hearted to breake him; to set him up, and take him downe, and up againe, and downe againe, when, and as often as we list. (1.6.50–80)

Of this lengthy list of threats, the last lines are the most devastating: Fitchow effectively inverts the male fantasy of using sexual pleasure to undermine a widow’s domestic power, instead envisaging the widow in the suitor’s conventional role of assuming control through the arousal and satisfaction of desire. The widow’s supposed sexual susceptibility is here transformed into sexual skill, the ultimate tool in the panoply of devices her experience has taught her for mastering men. As if literalizing this danger, the work of freeing Lucklesse from Fitchow now hinges on keeping him safely out of her bed. Tridewell engineers a scheme to “worke . . . a separation, before carnal copulation” (3.1.67), which begins with getting Fitchow sufficiently angered at Lucklesse’s undisguised preference for Constance that she locks him out of her bedroom on their wedding night; Lucklesse, of course, is delighted. Fitchow eventually agrees to a divorce, with the jealous stipulation that Constance must first marry Widgine, so as to be unavailable to Lucklesse. Constance Hold-up, impersonating her namesake, duly marries Widgine, the divorce is granted, and Tridewell triumphantly reveals that Lucklesse is free to remarry: the marriage had all been a sham, for unbeknownst to the couple (or the audience), he had rigged up a phony parson to perform the ceremony. Ironically, Tridewell goes to all this trouble not only to free his friend to marry the Northern Lasse (which Lucklesse joyously does), but to free Fitchow for himself: not least among the widow’s talents is hypocrisy, and she shows such a calculatedly angelic face to Tridewell when he goes to dissuade her from marrying Lucklesse that he falls for her himself. By the end of the play, however, Tridewell has seen Fitchow in action – most strikingly, in a song-and-dance number where the men join hands and sing the trials of a man married to a scold, and, as the stage directions have it, Tridewell “holds her off ” while Fitchow “scolds and strives to be amongst ’hem” (3.3). Even though it is suggested that Tridewell might be able to manage Fitchow better than Lucklesse could, he too may ultimately choose not to:

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t r i d ewe l l: Lady give me leave, if I have strayn’d a point of friendship, it was your love gave the strength to my wit. f i tc h ow: My love? t r i d ewe l l: Your love indeed Lady. Which (and which Cupid pardon me for) now, that I see I may enjoy, I am not so eagerly taken with. [Aside] (5.8.293–98)

Leaving the match between Tridewell and Fitchow to be decided in performance,15 the text opens the possibility that both men may celebrate having escaped the widow’s clutches. The sheer artfulness of the wonderfully contrived schemes and providential co-incidences which rescue fictional characters from life with the remarried widow seems a wistful acknowledgment of the audience’s world, in which marriage is indissoluble, and death, as Gervase Holles’s grandfather discovered, is hardly a reliable ally. But if the marriage-enabling deployment of the lusty widow stereotype inevitably defeated itself by countering anxieties about domestic government with an ultimately untenable fantasy of male sexual mastery, the same logic which impelled fictional escapes from widow-marriages could at least serve as consolation for the real-life suitor, like Thomas Whythorne, who had “escaped” against his will. Faced with a widow who breaks off their proposed match in displeasure that he would have her wait three weeks between betrothal and wedding, Whythorne finds himself in a dilemma. While proverbial wisdom has him suspect that his failure is due to his lack of sexual assertiveness, he realizes that success on such terms would be problematic, to say the least: Now I do perceive some great likelihood that these proverbs and old sayings be true which have been devised upon this sort of wooings. The one of which is thus: “Blessed be the wooing that is not long a-doing.” And if I had followed this proverb then my wooing had been at an end by this time. Also another saith that he who doth woo a maid shall not be the worse welcome though he come but now and then to her, as in three or four days; but he that wooeth a widow must ply her daily. Also another said that he that wooeth a maid must go trick and trim and in fine apparel; but he that wooeth a widow must go stiff before. I promise you so was I stiff. But yet, considering that the time was not like to be long to the wedding day; and also that the market was like to last all the year long; and I, loving her, meant not to attempt any dishonesty unto her, for a sinful fact it had been, till we had married, and we should have provoked God’s heavy displeasure and wrath to have lighted upon us for our wickedness. And if those be the causes of her revolt, then do I account her as good lost as found. (156)

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Despite his ambivalence, however, Whythorne evidently feels obliged to take these proverbs into account when he resumes his wooing. The relationship is rekindled when the widow gives Whythorne some gold, commissioning him to have it made for her into a ring “after the manner of a wedding ring”; in exchange, she takes one of his own rings and says “that she would wear it a while for [his] sake” (158, 159). All this being done without any new promise of marriage, Whythorne is unsure whether her wish to wear his ring is a sign of affection or of insulting suspicion that he might not return her gold. The business of the rings, however, is encouragingly loaded with marital and sexual connotations, and initiates a change in the tenor of the courtship: the occasional visits and explicit financial negotiations that led to the original match are replaced with Whythorne’s new resolve to “follow daily my enterprise” and not to “leave this matter thus rawly.” He thus takes “a lover’s leave” of the widow, and writes that in the four days of the ring’s making, “I did ply my widow for life. And to make her the more coming, or at least the more tractable and merry, I caused one of my lutes to be brought to her brother’s house, on the which I would sometimes play when I was there to pass the time away withal” (159). Without suggesting that any impropriety actually took place, these lines seem to code a more sexually-oriented approach: “ply,” equivocal in itself, refers back to the earlier-quoted proverb about widows’ expectations; “coming” can possess the sense of “sexually eager,” which its distinction here from the more general “tractable” may suggest; and the playing of the lute – albeit perfectly congruent with Whythorne’s profession – has connotations ranging from the conventionally romantic to the downright bawdy.16 But this approach too, ultimately fails – the widow, it appears, had been told by an astrologer that as she liked the ring, so she would like the husband. The ring not being to her satisfaction, Whythorne is dismissed. The trajectory of Whythorne’s courtship – first resisting, then halfcapitulating to his culture’s prescriptions for wooing a widow, only to find that his performance as the eager lover is equally futile – leads to an uncharacteristically vicious conclusion: Not long after my widow and I parted as is aforesaid, she being hot in the sear, and of the spur could tarry no longer without a make, and therefore in haste she stumbled under an ostler, who now doth lubber leap her. For he, with rubbing horseheels and greasing them in the roofs of their mouths, gat so much money as therewith he so bleared the widow’s eyes that she, thinking all had been gold that shined, took him to be her wedded spouse, So that the dor [dung-beetle], having flown all the day about among herbs and flowers, hath now shrouded her under a

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horseturd. And to say the truth, he is sweet enough for such a sweet piece as she is. (171)17

The widow’s fate with a greasy, lubberly, lower-class husband – whom she took in such hot sexual haste that her eye was “bleared” as to his financial status – serves as punishment, confirmation, and consolation all at once: punishment for having rejected Whythorne first for not being eager enough, and then again after reducing him to displays of unfelt romantic passion; confirmation that her unreasonable objection to his three-week delay was, as he had posited, symptomatic of a widow stereotypically “hot in the sear”; and consolation that such a wife is indeed, as he had stated earlier, “better lost than found.”

chapter 5

A playwright’s response: four Middletonian remarriage plots

Learn you to play a woman not so scornfully then; For I am like the actor that you spoke on: I must have the part that overcomes the lady, I never like the play else. Thomas Middleton, The Widow (1616), 1.2.145–48

Maybe it was his mother’s doing – bringing him up in her turbulent, litigious second marriage with the debt-ridden Thomas Harvey – but Thomas Middleton’s career as a playwright was marked by a near-obsessive preoccupation with widows, particularly the remarrying kind. Of the twelve undoubted, unassisted plays in the Middleton canon, seven include a widow, a remarried widow, or a woman who thinks herself, or is thought by others, to be a widow.1 When we add his collaboration with William Rowley, A Fair Quarrel (1617), plus two plays now widely considered to be Middleton’s – The Puritan (1606) and The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) – the total number of widows rises to ten. And if we look solely at his nine undisputedly canonical non-collaborative comedies, six of them feature widows who remarry or seek to do so.2 Most other playwrights of the period took casual advantage of the widow’s theatrical appeal, writing one or two comedies featuring a remarrying widow (Fletcher, with and without Beaumont, wrote three), but such plots are understood to be something of a Middletonian trademark: “The typical figures of Middleton’s city comedies,” remarks Muriel Bradbrook, “are the rich widow and the young spendthrift. For Middleton, the hunting of a widow and the setting up of a broken gallant are the favourite bases of intrigue” (164). While one can only conjecture as to whether this repetition has its roots in the playwright’s early family life, or simply reflects his professional assessment of audience tastes, the result is that Middleton’s plays show an unusual sensitivity to the complexity of his culture’s ideas about the remarrying widow. His staging and re-staging of various facets of these ideas, together with his characteristically irreverent attitude toward theatrical convention, 157

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result in explorations of courtship and remarriage strikingly different from the often formulaic comic plots of his contemporaries, and make his work inescapably central to any investigation of the remarrying widow and her suitors. Middleton’s practice of parodying, undermining, or otherwise subverting theatrical conventions is well known. While his city entertainments and masques often required an unequivocal and orthodox stance, in his plays he was, as John F. McElroy puts it, “An instinctive parodist, . . . almost constitutionally incapable of letting an established idea, posture, or technique evoke the expected (i.e., the conventional) response” (68).3 I want to focus here primarily on three plays – A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1611), and The Widow (1616) – in which, I will argue, Middleton undercuts the fantasy of sexually mastering a rich widow. A Trick and No Wit are both plays that ostensibly offer this fantasy to their audiences, but with a telling difference that continually threatens to undermine it: both the “rich widow” in A Trick, and the successful widow-wooer in No Wit happen to be entirely fake, not merely stage constructs, but constructs within the world of the play itself. A Trick, with its “Widow Medler” only a fantasy, effectively reveals the desires her suitors project upon her, while the wholly fictional masculinity assumed by Kate Low-Water to woo Lady Goldenfleece in No Wit parodies the anxious masculinity inherent in the culture’s dominant stereotypes of the widow. The Widow, Middleton’s last comedy of remarriage, presents a pointed and explicit debunking of the fantasy of the widow’s sexual susceptibility, satirically exposing its compensatory deployment, and denying the audience its customary pleasure in the “hero’s” triumph, in exchange for the more astringent and sophisticated pleasure of seeing through certain theatrical formulae. As The Phoenix (1604) and perhaps The Puritan illustrate, even Middleton’s early treatment of remarriage tends to be satiric: he shows little interest in staging the kind of celebratory narratives of conquest which drive Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1604), Barry’s Ram Alley (1608), or Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1614). Another of Middleton’s early comedies, Michaelmas Term (1606), is probably as close as he comes to offering a version of this narrative “straight.” The brief, temporary match between Easy and Thomasine Quomodo may occupy only the last five scenes of the play, but it is about as ideal a widow-marriage as a suitor could hope for. As Anthony Covatta points out, Michaelmas Term is a play concerned with initiation (City Comedies, 85), and its central initiate is the na¨ıve young gentleman from Essex, Richard Easy, who comes to London to enjoy life

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as a city gallant. For instruction in the pleasures of the City and the rules of fashionable behavior, Easy turns to a supposed fellow gallant, “Master Blastfield,” but finds only his undoing:4 Blastfield, who is in fact Shortyard, servant to the villainous woollen-draper Ephestian Quomodo, has attached himself to Easy for the purpose of embroiling him in a commodity scam. With neatly balanced irony, Easy’s desire to be a City “insider” leads to his entrapment in the scam – but his entrapment in the scam leads to his true initiation into London society. Easy is goaded into co-signing Blastfield’s ruinous bond by Quomodo’s calculated reluctance to have it signed by anyone but a citizen; deeply affronted, the insecure country gentleman insists on having his credit accepted as if he were a Londoner. But even as he is swindled out of his lands, his plight excites the pity – and his person the admiration – of Quomodo’s wife, Thomasine. When Quomodo feigns his own death to see whether his newly acquired property will be safe in the hands of his heir (unlike Chapman’s Lysander, he is at least as “jealous” over the fate of his lands as over the fate of his widow5 ), Thomasine promptly offers herself to Easy – and, more importantly, offers him the knowledge and power that he lacked as a newcomer to the City. Appearing on stage as Thomasine’s husband at the beginning of act five, Easy has evidently learned from her the details of Quomodo’s trickery. For the first time, he is able to fight back against the men who took advantage of his inexperience. Although the marriage itself gives him back his own goods and endows him with all of Quomodo’s, Easy is allowed to seize back the lands he lost with a display of aggression that works to redeem the passive gullibility of his earlier behavior. Quomodo does not leave the lands to his widow, as he apparently does the rest of his property, but wills them specifically to his foolish son Sim (4.1.46–50), who is speedily cozened out of the lands by Shortyard soon after Quomodo fakes his death. Thomasine points out Shortyard – “O, behold the villain who, in all those shapes, / Confounded your estate” (5.1.16–17) – and Easy attacks him, finally powerful in his awareness that his former “friend” is “Rogue, Shortyard, Blastfield, sergeant, deputy, coz’ner!” (5.1.21–22). Easy’s new-found power to expose Shortyard – not to mention the violence with which he “thirst[s] the execution of his ears” (5.1.23) – so intimidates the rogue that he readily offers up the lands, begging “Pray, sir, let not the city know me for a knave” (5.1.34). Shortyard, who had once pretended to initiate Easy into City life, realizes that the influence is now in Easy’s hands. And Easy, unmoved by his old teacher’s new servility, promptly has him arrested. Easy, as Covatta observes, “has become wiser in the ways of the City” (“Remarriage,” 461); as the new – and ethically improved – head of his London household,

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Easy steps symbolically into Quomodo’s position, with all the powerful knowledge of the City system that that implies. Moreover, Easy has no cause for any of the fears conventionally experienced by a widow’s new husband. Whereas the typical poor young man who marries a rich widow acquires property which in every sense except the strictly legal one belongs to his wife, Thomasine’s “generosity” is largely a deliberate restoration to Easy of what is rightfully his own. Far from attempting to usurp financial power over her husband, she instead asks the question that would be music to a second husband’s ears: “But are you sure you have all?” (5.1.52–53). Furthermore, in comparison to the impotent Quomodo, who “ne’er used [her] so well as a woman might have been used,”(4.3.54–55), Easy provides all the sexual satisfaction she can desire: as the newly bedded Thomasine contentedly remarks, “What difference there is in husbands, not only in one thing, but in all” (5.1.55– 56). And best of all, the marriage proves to have a built-in expiration date: Quomodo’s ill-judged prank of signing a memorandum that reads “I have received of Richard Easy, all my due I can claim here i’th’house or any hereafter for me” (5.1.114–16) divests him of everything except his wife. The crowning touch of Easy’s good fortune is that he gains all the benefits of marrying a widow – the status in City society that he had so longed for, London property, and other wealth, as well as the return of his own lands – without being tied for life to the woman he marries for wholly material reasons. If this all seems a bit too good to be true, though, the audience has more than the usual gap between theatre and reality available to remind them that Easy and Thomasine are but playing out a formula of wishfulfillment. The fantasy of a sexually frustrated, rich, London widow eager to give herself to the young man most in need is gently sent up when Middleton puts to parodic use the elements of the traditional morality play that have lain more or less dormant since Michaelmas Term’s opening scenes. At the start of the play, when Quomodo takes on the role of the Vice and instructs his “spirits,” Shortyard and Falselight, to lead Easy into temptation, the morality elements help to align the audience’s sympathies with Easy, to indicate that the play will be about the temptation and fall of a na¨ıve youth, and perhaps to suggest that the trickery of Quomodo and his “spirits” is of a more sinister and potentially harmful variety than the typical amoral gullings of city comedy.6 The exchange between Quomodo and Shortyard (1.1.76–133) initiates the morality pattern, but apart from scattered references to Shortyard and Falselight as “spirits,” the pattern does not become as visible again until Thomasine fastens her desires upon Easy. This time, however, the discrepancy between the action itself and

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the morality tags that crop up in the dialogue creates a rather different effect from the moral pointing that operates in the first act. Thomasine the pitying observer who comments from her “heavenly” position on the balcony during the swindling scenes may be perceptible to the seasoned viewer as the traditional Good Angel, but it is Thomasine the lusty widow, about to remarry with truly unseemly haste, who is explicitly referred to as such in Easy’s exclamation, “The angels have provided for me” (4.4.85).7 The comical discrepancy between a figure of divine grace and a newly widowed wife for whom “do[ing] that gentleman good” and “do[ing her]self a pleasure” (4.3.41) are one and the same calls attention to the morality allusion and to the outdated theatrical formula of redemption it describes, momentarily illuminating the notion of redemption-by-widow as a similar theatrical formula. This moment of comic deflation is followed by what seems to be an overtly parodic allusion to Everyman. Just as Everyman is guided by Knowledge as to how he may be redeemed through his Good Deeds, Easy learns from Thomasine’s knowledge how he too may be saved by his good deeds: Here’s good deeds and bad deeds, the writings that keep my lands to me, and the bonds that gave it away from me. These my good deeds, shall to more safety turn, And these my bad, have their deserts and burn. (5.1.57–61)

Spiritual salvation is replaced by the financial variety, virtuous “deeds” with valid legal papers. The humorous punning hardly invites serious moral consideration along these lines, but here as before, the discrepancy between source and allusion draws attention to itself and to the comforting fiction of the rich, desirous widow as a readily available economic savior. The teasing, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Easy’s miraculous reversal of fortune simultaneously caters to and pokes fun at audience expectations of a widow’s behavior. It is a treatment that Middleton extends and develops in A Trick to Catch the Old One, where the motif of remarriage is central to the plot. While other contemporary comedies which deal with a widow’s remarriage – such as The Widow’s Tears, which is very close in date to A Trick – portray a “real” widow (real, that is, within the fiction of the plot) who conforms to the stereotype of the widow amenable to the sex-formoney exchange, A Trick offers some unusual insights into the construction of this stereotype insofar as it stages a character who within the play’s fiction explicitly fashions herself according to cultural assumptions about the remarrying widow. Broke, and desperate to regain the property that he has mortgaged away to his uncle to finance his earlier prodigality, Witgood

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persuades his courtesan to “take the name and form upon [her] of a rich country widow, four hundred a year valiant, in woods, in bullocks, in barns and in rye-stacks” (1.1.59–61), and the pair heads to London, in the hope that “the name of a rich widow and four hundred a year in good earth,” will provoke “a kind of usurer’s love” in his uncle, Pecunious Lucre, and induce him to restore Witgood’s property (1.1.83–85). The Courtesan assumes the basic elements of this persona – widowhood and wealth – and maneuvers her way through the trick by reflecting back and embodying whatever desires the play’s men project on to her. For Witgood’s purposes, she becomes a widow infatuated with his youth and virility who nonetheless desires proof of his financial assets before she makes the marriage sure. For the rich, elderly Hoard – Lucre’s arch-enemy and soon Witgood’s “rival” for her hand – she becomes a “wise widow” willing to value a shrewd property match over sexual attraction. To the assorted minor characters who pick up the scent of the widow-hunt and join the chase, she is whatever they imagine her to be. As Swapan Chakravorty observes, the widow in A Trick is but “a projection of the gallants’ and citizens’ erotic and economic fetish” (59). The success of the trick, together with the absence of any “real” widow beneath it results in a comedy which, in one sense, makes the conventional fantasy of marrying a wealthy, lusty widow available to the audience, for Witgood is rewarded for his construction of a widow driven by sexual appetite, while Hoard is punished for hoping for one driven by greed.8 Yet, as I will argue, the play proceeds to build up the fantasy so precariously that it constantly threatens to topple over into exposing itself as a mere fantasy, wrapped around a hollow core of self-interest. While A Trick’s running joke on the points of comparison between a courtesan and a widow may help to perpetuate the notion that a widow is eager to hand over her property in a marriage for sexual satisfaction, the explicit constructedness of the fantasy figure and the sheer accumulation of imaginary widows and fantasizing suitors over the course of the play leave open the possibility that the absence of the desired widow at the heart of the trick has implications that go beyond simple deception. A spectator who clings to the usual assumptions about a widow’s nature may simply observe that the Courtesan acts in an un-widowlike way and marries a rich old man because she is only impersonating a widow, but the play may also be seen as undermining those assumptions themselves. With one hand, Middleton offers the lusty widow fantasy; with the other, he punctures it. To do so, the play must build up the idea that a rich widow can be won by virility in the absence of any actual widow through which to “prove” the

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stereotype, and must do so in the face of a plot device which requires its fake widow to display a most uncharacteristic interest in her young suitor’s financial attributes. Her desire to verify Witgood’s claim to wealth is an integral part of the trick, which hinges on the assumption that once Lucre hears of the widow’s interest he will repair his nephew’s fortunes so that the couple will marry and put the widow’s property within his grasp. This aspect of the plot is cleverly handled: Middleton’s skill with double entendre ensures that the “widow” whom Witgood constructs, his accomplice the Host presents, and Lucre believes in is one whose financial prudence is so intertwined with sexual interests that she sees Witgood’s (supposed or potential) wealth almost as an extension of his virility. The notion of the widow’s carnal desire pervades Witgood’s description of his success to the Host. (The Host, employed to act the part of her servingman, is aware of the plan to get money out of Lucre, but not aware that the “rich widow” is a fake.) Bringing the Host “report of a widow of four hundred a year” (1.2.19), Witgood adds credibility to his tale by embellishing it with hints of how his own masculine prowess won his bride-to-be: I ha’ brought her from her friends, turned back the horses by a sleight; not so much as one amongst her six men, goodly large yeomanly fellows, will she trust with this her purpose: by this light, all unmanned, regardless of her state, neglectful of vainglorious ceremony, all for my love; oh ’tis a fine little voluble tongue, mine host, that wins a widow. (1.2.23–28)

Evidently catching the intended sexual implication of the widow’s forsaking her six “goodly large yeomanly fellows” to follow, “all unmanned,” after Witgood’s love, the Host replies salaciously, “No, ’tis a tongue with a great T, my boy, that wins a widow” (1.2.29). Having convinced the Host that the widow is smitten with him, and that their potential match presents a fine opportunity to “draw some goodness” from his uncle (1.2.37), Witgood mentions his need to regain his estate as a matter of confirming, not inciting, the widow’s attachment to him. He does not wish to be found “untrue”: “I have put her in hope already of some estate that I have either in land or money: now, if I be found true in neither, what may I expect but a sudden breach of our love, utter dissolution of the match, and confusion of my fortunes for ever?” (1.2.37–41). When the Host goes to unfold the news to Lucre, the widow’s sexual susceptibility is emphasized over her concern for Witgood’s estate. She has now acquired a suggestive name – Widow Medler – and comes from Staffordshire, probably for the sake of a phallic double entendre on “staff.”9 And like all good fantasy widows, she is willing to overlook her favored

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suitor’s youthful prodigality for the sake of her “love.” As the Host describes it, the “bachelor” she is “fairly promised to” is one who “h’as spent some few follies in his youth, but marriage, by my faith, begins to call him home, my mistress loves him, sir, and love covers faults, you know” (2.1.43–48). The match will take place soon, he assures Lucre, for “I know my mistress will be married ere she go down; nay, I’ll swear that, for she’s none of those widows that will go down first, and be married after; she hates that, I can tell you, sir” (2.1.62–65). Eager to get married and “go down,” by this point the widow is no longer portrayed as looking out for her own financial interests. Instead, the Host claims that he is concerned for his mistress: Since your worship has so much knowledge in him [Witgood], can you resolve me, sir, what his living might be? My duty binds me, sir, to have a care of my mistress’s estate; she has been ever a good mistress to me, though I say it. Many wealthy suitors has she non-suited for his sake; yet, though her love be so fixed, a man cannot tell whether his non-performance may help to remove it, sir; he makes us believe he has lands and living. (2.1.86–93)

Witgood’s “non-performance” would literally be his failure to provide the property he has promised,10 but the Host is careful to couch the suggestion in sexual innuendo, so as not to undermine the notion that the widow is primarily interested in Witgood’s physical attributes. It is important that Lucre see the match as being as probable as possible, and also that he not perceive that Witgood is asking him for money. The Host thus manages to make it sound as if fulfillment of Witgood’s promise regarding “lands and living” is somehow confirmation that his “performance” in other areas will also live up to the advance billing. The idea that wealth is but a symbol of sexual potency for the widow is taken up eagerly by Lucre, as he hunts about for a gift to “hearten her on well”: “I have a very fair standing cup, and a good high standing cup will please a widow above all other pieces” (2.1.344–46). Lucre sends Witgood to show the widow through the rooms of his house, telling her that “this house and all comes to him” (2.1.321–22), but his real reason for having his nephew “carry her into all the rooms and bid her welcome” (2.1.326–27) is purely sexual – whether or not the widow is impressed with his rooms is quite irrelevant compared to Witgood’s opportunity to consummate the relationship in one of them. “Nephew, strike all sure above an thou beest a good boy” instructs Lucre, convinced that the widow will take such advances “the right way” (2.1.328–30). Lucre has thoroughly accepted the idea of the lusty widow offered by Witgood and the Host, and Witgood makes sure to keep the old man’s mind on the widow’s

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sexual requirements, downplaying any monetary concerns: he jokes freely about how “there’s nothing like the bringing of a widow to one’s uncle’s house” (2.1.231–32),11 but dismisses his pre-nuptial financial needs as a mere “trifle of a forty pound matter toward the setting of me forth; my friends should never have known on’t; I meant to make shift for that myself” (2.1.263–65). Were the Courtesan really a widow and not merely a scripted imposter, Witgood’s conventional construct of the lusty widow would in fact be proved wrong by the events of the play itself, for Widow Medler soon goes against all rules of the fantasy and abandons Witgood’s youthful virility in favor of the substantial estate offered by the elderly Hoard. As the Courtesan is a courtesan, however, the plot of A Trick does nothing to damage the fantasy that a real wealthy widow is made available by her desires. Hoard thinks that he has overcome the usual predilection of rich widows for poor but attractive young men when he convinces Widow Medler to choose him and his wealth instead, but the joke is that in agreeing to marry Hoard, the Courtesan is just doing what a courtesan does – trading her sexual favors (this time, in marriage) for a man’s money. As soon as Hoard hears of the “rich country widow . . . Four hundred a year landed” (2.2.13–14), he begins to build up fantasies of his own of a widow who will not only enrich him, but who is available to be bought rather than wooed: “Why, I am able / To buy three of Lucre, thrice outbid him, / Let my out-monies be reckoned and all” (2.2.50–52). Confident in the knowledge that he “can estate her fairly” (2.2.71), Hoard sets out to “bid” for the widow, accompanied by two gentlemen to back up his claims that Witgood is “a riotous, undone man, / Imperfect both in fame and in estate” (3.1.169–70), and that he, Hoard, is “grave, kind, and rich, / A match worthy yourself; esteeming him, / You do regard your state” (3.1.194–96). Hoard entices the widow with promises of a generous jointure – “He can join land to land, and will possess you of what you can desire” (3.1.197–98) (the humorous subtext here may be that Hoard cannot satisfy the widow’s desires in that other kind of “joining”) – and, belying his avowedly mercenary motives, portrays the match as a simple exchange of her “love” for his wealth, the exact reverse of the typical widow-marriage: co u rt e s a n: Alas, you love not widows but for wealth! I promise you I ha’ nothing, sir. h oa rd: Well said, widow, Well said; thy love is all I seek, before These gentlemen. (3.1.209–12)

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When the Courtesan feigns hesitation, one of Hoard’s spokesmen urges her on with a derogatory reference to the stereotyped widow’s preference for youth over wealth: “Come, you widows are ever most backward when you should do yourselves most good; but were it to marry a chin not worth a hair now, then you would be forward enough!” (3.1.203–05). Such contempt for the traditional fantasy-widow is echoed by another of the play’s sterile money-men, Witgood’s First Creditor, who fully approves Widow Medler’s choice of Hoard: “A’ my troth, she’s the wiser; she has made the happier choice; and I wonder of what stuff those widow’s hearts are made of, that will marry unfledged boys before comely thrum-chinned gentlemen” (4.3.4–7). Although the Courtesan pretends to be different from the “thousands of our wealthy undone widows” (4.1.47) who impoverished themselves for love, Witgood makes it clear that she marries Hoard and his money precisely because she is a courtesan, disqualified by her lost virginity from meriting a more attractive husband and therefore willing to “do [her]self a good turn” by grasping respectability and comfort in marriage to an old man (3.1.109–10). Witgood – but not Hoard and his cronies – understands that the kind of marriage that represents a “good turn” to a penniless courtesan is not the same as that by which rich widows “do [them]selves most good” (3.1.204), for the former is seeking monetary good and the latter, sexual. The spectacle of the young Courtesan with the elderly Hoard, moreover, carries the unspoken implication that she may well be looking forward to the day when she will be his widow: genuinely wealthy, respectable, and able to bury her old husband in exchange for a desirable young man. Part of the humor of A Trick thus derives from its extended play on the similarities and differences between a widow and a whore: the two “unheaded” female estates, in which women are ruled only by their appetites. How much discrepancy is there between the Courtesan and her persona of “Widow Medler”? The play’s recurring joke about the “Dutch widow” is only the most obvious manifestation of this theme. Arriving at a tavern to elope with the widow, Hoard is informed by the Drawer that his “gentlewoman” has not arrived, and that there is no one there but a “Dutch widow,” which he obligingly translates as “an English drab, sir” (3.3.13–15). And a few scenes later, Hoard’s exchange with the drunk and delirious Dampit is an obscene reminder of the shared sexual openness of widow and whore: dam p i t: Who’s this? Master Hoard? Who hast thou married, in the name of foolery? h oard : A rich widow.

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da m p i t: A Dutch widow? hoard : A rich widow; one Widow Medler. damp i t : Medler? She keeps open house. h oard : She did, I can tell you, in her tother husband’s days; open house for all comers; horse and man was welcome, and room enough for ’em all. damp i t : There’s too much for thee, then; thou may’st let out some to thy neighbours. (4.5.137–47)

While both Hoard and Dampit are unaware that the “Widow Medler” indeed “keeps open house” in the way that Dampit rudely suggests, Witgood plays ironically on the widow/whore analogy with his remark to Lucre, quoted above, about the “uncle’s house”; his insistence on the fact that the Courtesan has only had sexual experience with one man – “Excepting but myself, I dare swear she’s a virgin” (5.2.148–49) – drives home the similarity by making this particular whore especially like a widow. The play’s real virgin, Joyce Hoard, unsurprisingly considers both to be inferior to herself, as she chides herself for loving Witgood, a man “that for a widow’s bed, / Neglects thy purer love” (3.2.10–11). However, the ultimate joke of the widow/whore analogy lies not in these amusing similarities but in the fact that Hoard forgets that there is one crucial difference: a widow exchanges her money for sexual services, but a courtesan exchanges her sexual services for money. Blinded with greed for her non-existent “manors, manor houses, parks, groves, meadowgrounds . . . cattle, money, plate, jewels” (4.4.243–46), Hoard overlooks the basic rule of the widow-fantasy – rich widows are won by youth and virility, not by age and wealth. In seeking to buy a widow, he gets exactly what he deserves, namely, the kind of woman who can be bought. The Courtesan’s disguise and the conventional figure of a widow won through lust – which this joke upholds – operate together here to defeat Hoard through a kind of comic syllogism: All rich widows prefer virile young men over rich old ones. The Widow Medler prefers a rich old man over a virile young one. Therefore the Widow Medler is not a rich widow.

Hoard tries to “hoard” away to himself the widow’s wealth that should, according to the fantasy, be used to set up an impoverished youth, and his name, descriptive of his crime, comes to signify his retribution as well. Hoard finds himself “Whored.” While “Widow Medler” herself remains pliable, indefinite, a shifting fac¸ade on which one can project different images of what a widow desires,

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the Courtesan’s allusions to “real” widows contribute to building up the notion that widows customarily disregard financial prudence and marry for pleasure. Defending to Lucre her choice of Hoard over Witgood, she asks, Why, what would you wish me do, sir? I must not overthrow my state for love: We have too many precedents for that; From thousands of our wealthy undone widows One may derive some wit. (4.1.44–48)

The existence of “thousands of . . . wealthy undone widows” who have married into poverty for love – apparently a well-known and undisputed fact in the society of the play, though perhaps more wished for than common in the audience’s London – corroborates the joke against Hoard. Hoard thinks he has found an exception to these “thousands,” that is, a rich widow who will sacrifice her sexual needs to obtain more money, but he is proved wrong. When the one and only mercenary widow is unmasked as (naturally) a whore, the stereotyped lustful widow is upheld by default. I have focused up to this point on how the structure of A Trick builds up the lusty widow fantasy upon what is essentially an absence. As I have shown, the play makes it possible to imagine that that absence – the default value – stands for a “real” lusty widow, not present among the play’s characters on stage, but real enough in the fictionalized London society they inhabit and probably in the actual London beyond the theatre walls as well. But the play also offers an alternate possibility, for layered over the play’s basic plot of Witgood’s triumph and Hoard’s discomfiture is a host of other incidents and references regarding widows and widow-hunting. These details, involving not only the Courtesan but other imaginary widows as well, reveal the on-stage society as one in which the fantasy of making one’s fortune through a widow is built to such precarious heights that it threatens at any moment to topple over into absurdity. In short, when almost everyone in the play begins to construct a widow who serves his or her self-interested purposes, it becomes increasingly possible to see the absence on which these constructions are built as filled by nothing except self-interest and dreams of personal profit. Witgood, Lucre, and Hoard only begin the list of characters who project their desires against the non-existent Widow Medler and her four hundred pounds. The “happy rumour of a rich country widow” (2.2.12) ignites the imagination of nearly everyone it reaches, and each imagines her as pliable

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to his or her own needs. The characters of A Trick would certainly see the ballad refrain “For Maydens are wanton / and often times coy: / But Widdowes be wilfull / and never say nay” (Rollins, Garland, 264) as words to live by, as they abandon the virgin heiress Joyce Hoard for the more promising Widow Medler. First, Lucre’s wife Jinny (herself a remarried widow) sees in the widow an opportunity for helping her foolish citizen son, Sam Freedom, to more money and a measure of prestige. Lucre taunts her with how “your son there goes a-wooing to a poor gentlewoman but of a thousand portion; see my nephew, a lad of less hope, strikes at four hundred a year in good rubbish” (2.1.336–39), and Jinny immediately instructs her son to change the object of his pursuit. The country widow, in Jinny’s imagination, will be impressed with Sam’s London credentials – “nay, I have a reach; I can tell you thou art known what thou art, son, among the right worshipful, all the twelve companies” (2.1.357–59) – as well as with gifts of jewelry12 and with Sam’s own “proper person” (2.1.362–63), in which she herself displays a rather unmaternal interest. Like the other suitors, Jinny constructs the Widow Medler along the lines of her own desires – “If I were a widow, I could find it in my heart to have thee myself, son; ay, from ’em all” (2.1.363–64) – and Sam, accordingly, goes off to woo the widow in a “violent fashion” (2.1.366–67). Next, the aptly named Moneylove, who has suffered “great loss of time” (2.2.7–8) fruitlessly pursuing Joyce, dreams of finding a more accessible and willing target in the rich widow: a few words to discredit Witgood, and he can “drive a fair way . . . to the widow’s affections” (2.2.36–37). Moneylove has barely left the stage when Witgood’s three creditors enter, and in their glee at the thought that “Young Witgood will be a gallant again now” (2.2.55), they wishfully construct their own extremely wealthy widow, inflating her revenues beyond even the annual four hundred invented by the tricksters – “Nay, take’t of my word, if you believe that, you believe the least” (2.2.61–62). Within two short scenes, Witgood’s feigned pursuit of the widow has snowballed to include the genuine pursuits of Sam and his mother, Moneylove, Hoard, and the creditors who pursue Witgood for their share of the widow’s wealth. Middleton can hardly bring any more suitors on stage without weakening the momentum of his tightly knit plot, but he further builds their ranks up to a ludicrous number by creating the impression of a clamoring crowd of widow-wooers just beyond the bounds of the stage.13 After Witgood buys time with his creditors, the Courtesan re-enters to declare herself “so haunted with suitors . . . I know not which to dispatch first” (3.1.94–95). Witgood thus may well be telling the truth when he pressures Lucre with tales of his competition:

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Here comes one old gentleman, and he’ll make her a jointure of three hundred a year, forsooth; another wealthy suitor will estate his son in his lifetime, and make him weigh down the widow; here a merchant’s son will possess her with no less than three goodly lordships at once, which were all pawns to his father. (3.1.253–58)

“Peace, nephew, let me hear no more of ’em” (3.1.259) begs Lucre, but even at this point the weight of desire attached to one non-existent widow has already pushed the very notion of widow-hunting towards the absurd. Middleton, however, keeps at it, piling purely imaginary widows on top of the characters’ multiple constructions of the endlessly pliable Widow Medler. Lucre, wanting to paint his nephew as a desirable catch, suddenly invents an whole horde of widows who supposedly chase after Witgood, conjuring up the image of a London absolutely teeming with them: jolly rich widows have been offered him here i’th’ city, great merchants’ wives, and do you think he would once look upon ’em? Forsooth, he’ll none. You are beholding to him i’th’ country, then, ere we could be; nay, I’ll hold a wager, widow, if he were once known to be in town, he would be presently sought after; nay, and happy were they that could catch him first. . . Oh, there would be such running to and fro, widow, he should not pass the streets for ’em; he’d be took up in one great house or another presently. Fah! they know he has it, and must have it. (2.1.310–21)

Witgood’s ambiguous “it” that drives widows wild is likely not only Lucre’s legacy – “this house and all comes to him” (2.1.321–22) – but also his more personal, physical charms. And in a truly transparent instance of men constructing widows which serve their own interests, Witgood’s creditors persuade him to relinquish his supposed precontract with Widow Medler in exchange for Hoard paying his debts by inventing yet another rich widow, pliable, accessible, and wholly in their power to offer to Witgood in consolation for his loss. From the First Creditor’s spur of the moment suggestion that he could help Witgood “to a widow myself worth ten of her,” this imaginary widow rapidly acquires a name – “Mass, partner, and now you remember me on’t, there’s Master Mulligrub’s sister newly fallen a widow” – is endowed with specific property – “Cuds me, as pat as can be! There’s a widow left for you, ten thousand in money, beside plate, jewels, et cetera” – and is apparently quite without volition of her own. “I warrant it a match,” declares the First Creditor, “we can do all in all with her. Prithee dispatch; we’ll carry thee to her presently” (4.4.198–205). Once Witgood has signed the release, the ten thousand pound widow has served her turn and evaporates as readily as she had appeared.

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Although the plot of A Trick is based on the conventional notion that a rich old man cannot win a widow away from one who is young and sexually vigorous, however poor and disreputable he may be, Middleton does not permit his audience to fall quite as comfortably into the corollary assumption – that a rich widow is inherently lustful, easily won, and willing to overlook a young man’s defects in quest of his physical assets. Instead, he begins with a hollow core – the non-existent Widow Medler – and shows how this “widow” is progressively constructed out of the self-interest of others: Witgood and the Courtesan’s plan to redeem his fortune, Lucre’s wish to discomfit his enemy and to swindle a new gull, Hoard’s desire to trip up Lucre and to augment his own wealth, Moneylove’s desire to marry money without the unprofitable delay of wooing a virgin, and the assorted aspirations of Jinny Lucre, Sam Freedom, and the three creditors, not to mention the implied mercenary urges of the suitors who wait offstage. When other, equally imaginary, widows begin popping up out of thin air – Master Mulligrub’s newly bereaved sister, and the importunate women who practically threaten Witgood with rape – they build the whole fantastic edifice of widows and wooers to a point where it becomes difficult to take seriously. A Trick goes beyond the simple dichotomy of truth and deception, where the Courtesan stands in for a “real” but absent widow; rather, the widow-fantasy in this play threatens to crumble under the sheer weight of its own over-constructedness to reveal that there is nothing at its center but the suitor’s desires. Having opened up the possibility in A Trick that the sought-after remarrying widow is but a customized projection of male self-interest, in No Wit Middleton turns his attention to the suitor, using parody to suggest that the suitor’s fantasy of obtaining a widow’s money through her lust – and then, as the theatre can improve upon real life, getting rid of her – is based in fears about his own lack or loss of masculinity in the relationship. For just as there is no “real” widow beneath the accumulation of desires that makes up the Widow Medler, there is a very significant “lack” at the centre of the successful suitor for the hand of the widowed Lady Goldenfleece: “he” is a woman. With Kate Low-water’s trick to win the Low-water family fortune back from Lady Goldenfleece (whose late husband, a usurer, defrauded it from the Low-waters), the play presents a scenario which moves through the usual script of the aggressive courtship and hasty marriage of a widow, and on to the problems of financial control and potential cuckoldry which conventionally plague the new husband once the wedding is over. While Kate plays out both parts of the scenario for reasons inherent in her trick, her behavior as the suitor interacts at times with the literal lack of masculinity

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beneath her disguise, and with the widow’s failure to adhere to the stereotype, to parody the suitor who fantasizes a widow’s lust in compensation for the threat she poses to his masculine power and authority. For this parody to work, the audience must be allowed a certain amount of intellectual and emotional distance from Kate, who has been described as “an almost Shakespearian heroine transported from the world of Arden or Illyria to the corrupt realities of Jacobean London” (Muir, 156). Chastely married to an appreciative husband who assists her throughout the plot, Kate is the familiar cross-dressed heroine who resourcefully maneuvers her way through a very complex trick of her own design. She disguises herself to join the ranks of the widow’s suitors, defeats them with a combination of wit, bravado and sexually aggressive wooing, and then avoids consummating her marriage to Lady Goldenfleece by feigning distrust of the widow’s supposed “cunning” (5.1.59) in regard to both her money and her sexual fidelity. Kate then arranges for Lady Goldenfleece to be caught in a compromising position with her (Kate’s) brother Beveril, demands a separation in which she can keep the widow’s wealth, and reveals her true identity only when the widow contracts herself to Beveril, who will share his gains with his sister. Since Lady Goldenfleece is introduced as “the late wife / To the deceas’d Sir Avarice Goldenfleece, / Second to none for usury and extortion” (1.1.160–62), she seems hardly an undeserving target of such a scheme. The initial contrast between the usurer’s stately widow, enjoying her suitors’ attentions, and the poor but resolute young woman who introduces herself with an eloquent speech defending her chastity and objecting that it is “injustice that a widow laughs / And lays her mourning part upon a wife” (1.2.16–17) may build expectations of the kind of plot which Kenneth Muir describes, in which “the virtuous have to out-smart the wicked” (157). But the audience’s response to Kate is in fact problematized from the moment she conceives her scheme. Leinwand observes “an implicit parallel between the thoroughly self-centered and degenerate Sir Gilbert Lambston and Kate,” adding that “[b]oth plan to ‘marry’ Lady Goldenfleece that they may put her money to use” (163). If we pursue this parallel further, it becomes evident that Lambston’s repugnant little plan is in fact Kate’s inspiration for her trick. Lambston, as he explains in his letter, wants to marry the widow so he may use her money to buy his own sexual pleasure with Kate. “Only consent to my desires,” he writes, “and the widow’s notch shall lie open to you” (1.2.91–92). Upon reading the letter, Kate immediately conceives the disguise trick. Dressed as a desirable youth, Kate will access the widow’s “notch” herself, winning herself the gains that Lambston

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has promised her but dispensing with his proposed role as the middle man. The audience does not know at this point what Kate means to do, but it will soon become apparent that her “pity” (1.2.98) for the widow is as self-interested as Lambston’s offer to “comfort” (1.2.83) Kate in her poverty. Moreover, the pattern of Kate’s imitating Lambston’s techniques is repeated at a crucial point in the trick itself: both plot to revenge themselves on the widow by slandering her sexual reputation. Shortly after Lambston and the other disappointed suitors put their plans to be “sland’rous in every place” (3.1.36) into action by hijacking her wedding masque, Kate tricks Beveril into Lady Goldenfleece’s bedroom and assembles the wedding guests to witness the widow’s supposed adultery. In city comedy, the morality of a trick like Kate’s is not usually an issue (no one is invited to question the rights and wrongs of Witgood or Pyeboord), but by twice aligning it with the behavior of the play’s most obvious villain, the play creates a certain critical distance from the amoral fun Kate’s scheme would otherwise provide. The second and perhaps more important technique by which the play complicates audience response to Kate is not moral but structural. The usual theatrical pleasure to be had from a “trickster” plot consists in watching the trickster’s well thought out plan being put into action, enjoying his moments of success and sharing his suspense when things go awry. This pleasure depends largely on the trickster’s providing the audience with advance knowledge of the trick’s desired outcome and how it will be obtained: Witgood will claim to be in a rich widow’s favor so his uncle will give him his mortgage back; Pyeboord and Captain Idle in The Puritan will pose as cunning-men so that Sir Godfrey will pay them to find his missing gold chain. Regarding Kate’s plan to win her fortune back from Lady Goldenfleece, however, No Wit continuously keeps its audience in the dark. When, after her encounter with Lambston and his letter, Kate suddenly switches from despondency to optimism about her fortunes and asks her husband to “second / The purpose I intend” (1.2.157–58), she provides no inkling of what that purpose might be. Instead, she gives a cryptic speech about clear-sightedness (1.2.142–48), an ironic keynote on which to begin a series of machinations that will be anything but clear to the audience. At her next appearance, she is disguised as a gentleman, with her husband in tow as a servant, and invites herself to a banquet given by Weatherwise in Lady Goldenfleece’s honor. It is still unclear what she means to do. She produces Lambston’s incriminating letter, with a tale of how it fell into the hands of a kinsman of hers, and the widow duly banishes Lambston and thanks Kate, but as Kate neither requests nor receives payment for the

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favor, her intentions remain mysterious. Her husband is evidently pleased with her progress – “Now, now! The suitors flatter; hold on, Kate; / The hen may pick the meat, while the cocks prate” (2.1.399–400) – but the audience does not discover until act two, scene three, that Kate means to woo the widow herself. This revelation, however, raises a far greater question than it resolves: once Kate woos, wins, and weds the widow, then what will she do with her? How does she plan to get her hands on the money and lands, when the wedding night will make clear that she is unable to provide what the widow married her for? Kate seems to have worked herself into a thoroughly untenable situation, for her legal title to the widow’s property through marriage depends on a disguise which the marriage itself will render difficult, if not impossible, to maintain; besides, no trick worthy of the name is ever based on the permanent relinquishment of one’s identity. But Kate appears unperturbed by these concerns, and her untroubled joy at the match – expressed without the least hint of how she intends to profit from it – merely makes the audience more aware that they are not in her confidence: Oh, my blessing! I feel a hand of mercy lift me up Out of a world of waters, and now sets me Upon a mountain, where the sun plays most, To cheer my heart ev’n as it dries my limbs. (2.3.246–50)

Although Kate continues in this vein for twelve more lines, her original plans for herself and the widow are never revealed, for the trick as it unfolds from here on is dependent upon a string of coincidences which keeps the audience in uncertainty to the very end. Kate’s brother Beveril unexpectedly shows up, but this in itself solves nothing; Kate overhears Beveril say that he loves the widow (3.1.313) and she decides to “provide” for him (3.1.319), but she has no way of knowing that Lady Goldenfleece will choose Beveril for her husband after Kate uses him to procure her separation. The dramatic interest generated by a trickster trying to pull off a trick that seemingly leads into a dead end, and about whose plans the audience is kept guessing, is an entirely adequate substitute for the more conventional pleasure of being let in on all the trick’s secrets. The play itself does not suffer from Kate’s inscrutability; the audience, however, kept in a state of perpetual uncertainty, would likely find themselves more detached from her character than her engaging position as cross-dressed heroine and trickster would otherwise allow.

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Prevented from following Kate’s behavior as it works through the preexplained moves of a plan, the audience may be left with a clearer awareness of the familiar pattern it imitates: the poor young suitor who courts his widow aggressively, marries her hastily, and then, like Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, repents his bargain amid a power struggle over his government of her money, independence, and sexuality. I have argued that the prospect of marrying an older, wealthier widow who is likely to continue to dominate her household is a threat to a young man’s masculinity, for which he attempts to compensate by imagining the widow as conquerable through her desire. When a play which depicts this scenario supports the suitor’s fantasy, the mechanism of anxiety and compensation is submerged beneath the widow’s lustful “proof” that the suitor’s assumptions are correct; furthermore, such a play generally ends with the wedding, stopping short of depicting the domestic situation which gives rise to the original anxiety, and leaves the impression that the suitor has prevailed. The Widow’s Tears, which does follow its couple a little beyond the wedding, is an excellent example of such submersion: Eudora’s aroused longings effectively overcome her disdain for the man she regards as her “vassal” (2.4.162), making Tharsalio’s audacious sexual advances appear shrewd rather than anxious, and he ultimately demonstrates his new domestic mastery by arranging her daughter’s marriage. No Wit, however, presents a situation in which the widow’s lust cannot compensate for the suitor’s feared masculine inadequacy, but instead points it up hilariously, for Kate is not only without the attributes of manhood that a widow’s young suitor typically lacks – money, property, a household, and social status to match the widow’s own – but as a woman disguised as an immature male, she fundamentally lacks any manhood at all. Susan Zimmerman observes that No Wit plays with gender ambiguity and multi-valent erotic responses, given that Lady Goldenfleece’s attraction to the disguised Kate is simultaneously an attraction “to an unfinished youth, a womanly boy . . . and (unknowingly) to the more mature aspects of a self-sufficient woman” (49, original emphasis); the dynamic, of course, is further complicated by the fact that outside the fiction, both “women” are in fact boy actors. Significantly, though, there is no fully masculine, adult male aspect to Kate’s ambiguously gendered persona, for the boys beneath the stage convention of “Kate’s” femininity – both the boy actor, and the “boy” created by Kate’s disguise – are notably lacking in masculinity, as the disappointed suitors insultingly observe (4.3.69–71). The cross-dressed Kate – male (though only marginally so) on the outside, and (fictionally) female on the inside – going through the usual moves of courting a widow thus presents a visual pun suggesting that the masculine audacity and sexual

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aggression of the typical widow-wooer conceals an anxiety over whether he is “man” enough to handle the threat she poses. And Middleton’s depiction of the marriage between the widow and the woman/youth brings the parody into sharper focus: whereas the young man conventionally fears that the remarried widow will subordinate and emasculate him in the battle for financial and sexual control, Kate fears, quite literally, that her marriage to the widow will “emasculate” her – that is, it will reveal that she is not a man – and so she accuses Lady Goldenfleece of the whole gamut of a remarried widow’s traditional vices in order to forestall consummation and preserve her “masculinity.” Poverty-stricken, powerless but for her wit, and literally lacking any kind of manhood, Kate exceeds the widow’s two other main suitors, Lambston and Weatherwise, in sexually aggressive wooing. The three suitors form a scale in which their social and financial markers of manhood (and in Kate’s case, parodying the conventional situation, the physical marker as well) stand in inverse proportion to the extent to which each suitor bolsters himself with assumptions of the widow’s lust and courts her accordingly. At the top of the social and financial scale is Lambston, who is not only young and sexually attractive, but also a wealthy knight, and so has the least reason to be threatened by the widow’s wealth and status.14 Assured of his own worth – “I have the least fear, / And the most firmness; nothing can shake me” (2.1.156–57) – Lambston woos Lady Goldenfleece with merely a smattering of sexual suggestiveness, kissing her once and reading a bawdy innuendo into one of the couplets at Weatherwise’s astrological banquet (2.1.72–73). Pepperton and Overdon, the widow’s two elderly suitors, may snipe at the knight’s “saucy courting” (2.1.40), but they are critical only because their age disqualifies them from any sexual advances whatsoever. As Weatherwise puts it, “they have shot two arrows without heads; / They cannot stick i’th’ butt yet” (2.1.23–24). Weatherwise himself, however, is clearly poorer and less powerful than Lambston and there is, accordingly, a harder sexual edge to his courtship of the widow.15 From his first decision to court the widow, Weatherwise’s sexually suggestive remarks are linked with evidence of his insecurity over his worth as a suitor and his resultant need to insist on his ability to master and dominate his domestic subordinates. Weatherwise suffers a blow to his pride when Sir Oliver Twilight refuses his suit to marry his daughter Jane, and his immediate response is to remind himself with a graphic double entendre that Lady Goldenfleece, like all widows, is sexually experienced and thus easily available:

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I’ll never leave the love of an open-hearted widow for a narrow-ey’d maid again; go out of the road way like an ass to leap over hedge and ditch; I’ll fall into the beaten path again and invite the widow home to a banquet. Let who list seek out new ways, I’ll be at my journey’s end before him. (1.1.291–97)

Nonetheless, Weatherwise worries about his inferiority to his wealthy, titled rival – “nay, and Sir Gilbert strike, my weapon falls; / I fear no thrust but his” (2.1.21–22). Fittingly, then, his attempts at bawdy wit with the widow – the kind of wooing he imagines the “beaten path” will respond to – are frequently mingled with an anxious desire to assert his authority. As he welcomes the widow to his house, he hints at his potency by joking about having seduced his maidservants. Sexual mastery, he assures himself, goes hand in hand with domestic authority: weat h e rwi se: Welcome, sweet widow, to a bachelor’s house here; a single man I, but for two or three maids that I keep . . . You must think, sweet widow, if a man keep maids, they’re under his subjection. l a dy g olde nf leec e : That’s most true, sir. weat h e rwi se: They have no reason to have a lock but the master must have a key to’t. (2.1.9–18)

A little later, he applies this conflation of sexual and domestic authority to the widow herself: weat h e rwi se: Sweet widow, take your place at Aries here; that’s the head sign. A widow is the head till she be married. l ady g olde nf leec e : What is she then? weat h e rwi se: The middle. l a dy g olde n f leec e : ’Tis happy she’s no worse. (2.1.99–102)

Faced with the prospect of marrying a woman accustomed to being the head of her own household, the suitor trusts that her need for his sexual attentions – as implied by the sexual connotations of “the middle” – will enable her to accept peaceably her demotion from the top of the domestic hierarchy. As Weatherwise is foolish enough to state explicitly his hope to master the widow – a cleverer wooer, like Chapman’s Tharsalio, keeps to himself any fantasies of effecting domestic control through sexual mastery (Widow’s Tears, 1.1.178–80) – it is little wonder that Lady Goldenfleece does not even consider marrying him. If Weatherwise has little to offer the widow, Kate has nothing, and nothing to boot. Weatherwise depends on the widow’s lust to bolster the

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inadequacy of his socially and financially defined manhood; Kate, impoverished and a woman to boot, pushes the inverse relation between fragile manhood and bawdy wooing to the point of absurdity. Once she has disposed of Lambston with the letter, her flimsy male persona must rely absolutely on the stereotype of the lusty widow in order to woo Lady Goldenfleece. And in an amusing paradox, her persona faces its greatest threat from the lust on which it relies: “But soft ye, Kate,” cautions Master Low-water, “How and she should accept of your bold kindness?”. “A chief point to be thought on, by my faith,” she admits, and arranges for her husband to rescue her from the widow’s amorous response (2.3.94–96). In Kate’s parodic case, the sexually aggressive wooing traditionally practiced by the impoverished young suitor masks not only social and financial inferiority but a physical lack of masculinity as well. She is, as her husband jokingly reminds her, “a bad pricker” (2.3.78), but she reassures herself that sexual bravado is all she needs: I am to begin the world like a younger brother; I know that a bold face and a good spirit Is all the jointure he can make a widow. An’t shall go hard, but I’ll be as rich as he, Or at least seem to, and that’s wealth enough; For nothing kills a widow’s heart so much As a faint bashful wooer; though he have thousands, And come with a poor water-gruel spirit And a fish-market face, he shall ne’er speed. (2.3.82–90)

Accordingly, she accosts the widow with outrageous sexual advances, meeting her polite apology for lateness with the rejoinder that “you shall make me amends for that then, with a quickness in your bed” (2.3.108–09), and seizing her with a forthright declaration, “Come make but short service, widow, a kiss and to bed, I’m very hungry, i’faith, wench” (2.3.125–26). Kate even transforms her poverty into an advertisement for her “virility”: Oh, a younger brother has an excellent stomach, madam, worth a hundred of your sons and heirs that stay their wedding stomachs with a hot bit of a common mistress, and then come to a widow’s bed like a flash of lightning. Y’are sure of the first of me, not of the five hundredth of them. (2.3.128–33)

Although it momentarily appears as if Kate has offended Lady Goldenfleece with this approach – “there’s but two paths that lead to widows’ beds,” she laments, “that’s wealth or forwardness, and I’ve took the wrong one” (2.3.178–79) – the widow soon agrees to the match.

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But while the lusty-widow stereotype would seem to have triumphed again, Kate’s insistence on her virile virginity in fact has the effect of complicating Lady Goldenfleece’s motives for accepting the proposal.16 Having narrowly escaped marriage to a whore-master like Lambston, the widow seems attracted to Kate’s male chastity for reasons more serious and admirable than the intended promise of reserved sexual energy. While Kate boasts of her “excellent stomach” for sex, the widow declares herself “moved” by the young gallant’s “purity” and “good portion of chastity” (2.3.146, 156). “There comes few such to market among women” (2.3.175), she admires, and calls in the rejected suitors to witness her betrothal. Lady Goldenfleece does not lack for sexual appetite, as her wedding night shall prove, but the moral considerations that share in her desire to marry Kate remove her a step from a stock lustful widow like Eudora of The Widow’s Tears, who is incited to marry Tharsalio by tales of how many women his impressive sexual capacity has worn out. By 1613, such lascivious prototypes as Eudora and Taffata have been joined by the pre-maritally chaste figures of Lady Bright (Amends for Ladies) and Widow Raysby (Tu Quoque), but even these widows are desirous enough to ignore the moral dubiousness of suitors who trick them into contracts or threaten them with daggers. Between Lady Goldenfleece’s failure to conform fully to the stereotype on which Kate so heavily relies, and the sexually aggressive wooing that masks Kate’s utter lack of masculinity, the play hints that what the lusty widow stereotype really conceals is not a truth about widows but the suitor’s sense of his fragile manhood unequal to the widow’s power. Once Kate has wooed and won her widow, the play moves on to a very funny look at the power struggle which supposedly plagues such marriages. Lady Goldenfleece’s rejected suitors, angry at having been thrown over for a “boy,” await the marital battle with relish, hoping that the widow will get the worst of it. Kate first makes use of their assumptions to convince them, even before she proposes, that the match has been clapped up. She swaggers around the widow’s house, berates the servants, and disrespectfully refers to the widow by her first name, prompting Weatherwise to exclaim with satisfaction, she’s fitted, i’faith; a proud surly sir here, he domineers already; one that will shake her bones and go to dice with her money, or I have no skill in a calendar. Life! He that can be so saucy to call her Bess already, will call her prating-quean a month hence. (2.3.70–75)

In the vengeful masque that the suitors present on the couple’s wedding day, they imply that the widow has chosen to marry an effeminate sex toy,

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an insignificant and unmanly spouse whom she can reduce to the status of a wife: Rich widows, that were wont to choose by gravity Their second husbands, not by tricks of blood Are now so taken with loose Aretine flames Of nimble wantonness and high-fed pride, They marry now but the third part of husbands, Boys, smooth-fac’d catamites, to fulfill their bed, As if a woman should a woman wed. (4.3.64–70)

Besides reminding the audience of Kate’s disguise and slandering Lady Goldenfleece with perverse sexual tastes,17 the last line suggests that the rich widow will seek to master her “husband.” Daniel Tuvil, discussing the hazards of moneyed brides in Asylum Veneris (1616), uses the same metaphor as he translates Martial’s epigrammatic refusal to marry a “wealthie Widow”: Demand you why, with one that’s rich to marrie I denide? The reason was, unto my wife I would not be the bride. (160–61)

Lady Goldenfleece’s rejected suitors hope, however, that she will instead live in discord with a husband who will dominate her: “The fourth day a great storm, lightning and thunder; / A bolt strikes the suitor, a boy keeps her under” (4.3.99–100). What poor Lady Goldenfleece gets, much to her bewilderment, is a husband who, without any provocation, proceeds to act out the conflict that marriage to a rich widow is conventionally believed to create. As texts such as Jack of Newbury (1597), The Phoenix, and “Nobody his Counsaile to Chuse a Wife” (c. 1622) suggest, the compensating fantasy of the widow’s desire and accessibility merely sets up the suitor to suffer new fears when he becomes the husband of the woman whom he has so constructed: the lusty widow becomes the insatiable wife, posing a further threat to his masculinity with her ability to cuckold him. Parodying the young husband who fears emasculation at the hands of the remarried widow’s rampant sexuality, Kate too is afraid that the widow’s sexual appetite will emasculate her – literally, for the physical consummation that Lady Goldenfleece desires threatens to divest Kate of her male disguise. To preserve her “masculinity,” she launches a pre-emptive strike against the widow’s supposed adulterous tendencies. Needing to keep herself out of Lady Goldenfleece’s bed in order

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to keep her disguise intact, Kate first feigns preoccupation with the moral questions of the widow’s ill-gotten estate, and then when the Lady presses for her wedding-night due, Kate turns accusatory: I like you worse For this fond heat, and drink in more suspicion of you, You high-fed widows are too cunning people For a poor gentleman to come simply to. ............... You may make a youth on him. ’Tis at your courtesy, and that’s ill trusted; You could not want a friend, beside a suitor, To sit in your husband’s gown, and look over your writings. (5.1.57–64)

The image of “a friend . . . to sit in your husband’s gown, and look over your writings,” hinting simultaneously at the wife’s financial trickery and her sexual misbehavior, neatly conflates the two main areas in which the young husband traditionally fears being reduced to a powerless “youth” rather than respected as a man. Lady Goldenfleece, however, scarcely fits into the script that Kate has written for their marriage. Not only is she innocent of any unfaithfulness, but she shows no signs of denying her new husband control over her money: “As for wealth now,” she reassures him, “you know that’s got to your hands” (5.1.42). And in her bewildered dismay after Kate’s refusal to consummate the match, she not only confirms her willingness to relinquish her estate, but speaks with a kind of pathos that again sets her apart from the stock figure of the lustful widow.18 The word “love,” for her – in contrast to, say, Widow Taffata of Ram Alley – is not merely a euphemism for sex: Have I yet married poverty and miss’d love? What fortune has my heart? That’s all I crav’d, And that lies now a-dying; it has took A speeding poison, and I’m ignorant how; I never knew what beggary was till now. My wealth yields me no comfort in this plight; Had want but brought me love, I’d happen’d right. (5.1.77–83)

Even after Kate slanders her with adultery and demands a separation, the widow offers her half of her “wealth within doors” (5.1.214) to depart in charity. As with the lusty widow, the stereotype of the remarried widow who “makes a youth” of her husband financially and sexually is revealed as one

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which serves Kate better than it fits Lady Goldenfleece, and which is created specifically out of Kate’s anxiety over literally not being “man” enough to handle the widow. While Kate’s “masculine inadequacies” are amusingly literal, quite different from those that worry the usual young husband of a widow, and her construction of the stereotype is a deliberate part of her trick, the transvestite “suitor” and “husband” are an emblem of the threatened masculinity behind the image of the insatiable and uncontrollable remarried widow. Kate, like Middleton’s young widow-suitors before her, ends the play with the widow’s money in hand and the marriage evaded. But the motif of escape is subverted when the play explicitly presents Kate’s “escape” from the widow as the widow’s escape from Kate. Lady Goldenfleece’s friends, whom Kate has gathered to witness her separation from the supposedly adulterous widow, instead take the widow’s part, trying to persuade Kate to “some agreement reasonable and honest” (5.1.232), and pressing her to reveal how she might give the widow “free liberty to marry again” (5.1.281). When Kate declares herself “married to another,” the others rejoice in Lady Goldenfleece’s escape: “Hoyda! There’s a release with a witness! / Thou’rt free, sweet wench!” (5.1.307–09). And although the widow’s selection of Beveril for her new husband contributes to Kate’s success, the match is one which grants her a truly desirable mate: a scholarly gentleman, sincerely in love with her and apparently quite uninterested in her wealth. In contrast to the parallel situation in The Puritan, in which Lady Plus is removed from Idle and bestowed upon Muckhill, the resolution of No Wit takes as much account of the widow’s future happiness as it does of the suitor’s. And such a conclusion is necessary, for No Wit, unlike any of Middleton’s previous plays, pays as much attention to the widow’s desires and disappointments as it does to the suitor’s. “Sympathy” is less the issue here than focus: Castiza, in The Phoenix, is a more sympathetic character than the Captain, while Michaelmas Term’s Thomasine matches Easy on a scale of virtues and follies, but each play is more engaged with its men, what they want, what they suffer, how they ultimately fare in their plans. In No Wit, however – and perhaps it is because there is no successful male suitor to follow – Lady Goldenfleece is laid open to the audience’s understanding in ways that Kate is not. While Kate pursues her impenetrable scheme, the widow’s desires and motivations are all revealed, her character developed and particularized through a host of small details: her initial desire to marry Lambston for “titles and more riches” (2.1.377), her distaste for fickleness, her horror at Lambston’s true intentions, her admiration of male chastity, her gentle, witty mocking of the foolish Weatherwise, her moral blind spot as to her

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ill-got inheritance and her eventual realization of the price it carries, her ability to laugh at the slanderous masque and to forgive the petty jealousy of her suitors. Despite being the victim of Kate’s trick, she is not silenced, effaced, nor made a laughingstock, but ends the play with enough dignity to serve as the key figure in the subplot’s denouement. This new focus on a widow who is as much the center of dramatic interest as her suitor is, and is not merely his threat or his prize, anticipates The Widow, the title of which indicates the play’s central concern. Of the comedies discussed in this chapter, The Widow is the one most neglected by critics. The neglect is perhaps unsurprising – what, after all, is one to make of the main plot, which contravenes comic expectations and poetic justice so bizarrely? Middleton pits a sensible, witty, and unusually un-lusty widow against a thoroughly mercenary and unethical young man, and has her battle him throughout the play in a lawsuit for illegal entrapment into a marriage contract; then, when she finally wins, the playwright unexpectedly concocts a “happy ending” out of having the widow accept her adversary, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, as a husband who loves her for herself and not her money. If Ricardo, the suitor, sounds much like any number of his aggressive and mercenary widowwooing predecessors – Tharsalio, Bould, or William Smalshankes – the widow, Valeria, differs from her evidently desirous counterparts (Eudora, Lady Bright, Taffata) in a way that makes The Widow a play thoroughly unlike The Widow’s Tears, Amends for Ladies, or Ram Alley. While the above widows are either obviously moved by lust for their young suitors, or, in the virtuous Lady Bright’s case, declare their love unequivocally, Valeria does not dignify Ricardo’s aggressive tactics by the smallest admission of love, lust, or even attraction toward him, apart from a single, ambiguous line in the final scene. And while Ricardo, like Spendall in Tu Quoque, passes a token fifth-act test of his “love,” his speeches both before and afterward stress that his main interest is in Valeria’s wealth. In the little that has been written about the play, critics have tried to rehabilitate Ricardo into a less jarring match for the likeable Valeria.19 The rehabilitation efforts begin with David Holmes, who claims that Ricardo “has qualities that militate against his faults and look forward to his improvement,” but he only comes up with three: the fact that Ricardo does not conceal his poverty (few widow-wooers do), his dislike of artificiality (though he apparently has no trouble with deceit), and the virtue of being “not indifferent to the interests of his friends” (141–42), a statement which might be found debatable by the friends – his accomplices – whom he forgets to bail at 2.2.99–116. Dorothy Farr, without going into further detail, simply states

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that Ricardo “for all his recklessness is sound at heart” and is directed by his “better nature” in the play’s closing scenes (13). But the obstacles which the Ricardo rehabilitators are up against are perhaps best measured by Robert Levine’s introduction to his edition of the play. Worried by “inconsistencies in theme and characterization,” Levine suggests that such inconsistencies “can be softened or eliminated by careful stage directing”: Ricardo’s coarseness should not prevent his being liked by the audience. He should look lovingly at the widow whenever they encounter, so as to emphasize his interest in her person. This would make up for his never referring to Valeria by her given name, only by “the rich widow” or “the widow.” Moreover, his loving looks would distinguish him from the First Suiter, whose philosophy – Ther’s two words to a bargain ever All the world over, and if love be one I’m sure mony’s the other. (.1.377–379)

– might otherwise associate him too closely with Ricardo. ()

That an editor would feel the need to make such suggestions indicates the distance between The Widow and, say, The Widow’s Tears: Tharsalio, for all his coarseness and mercenary attitude, does not have to resort to “loving looks” to win an audience over. Unlike Ricardo, he is justified by his exuberant self-confidence (no traps or lawsuits for him) and above all, by the fact that he is right. Eudora is everything he claims she is. The most recent editor of The Widow, Gary Taylor, is more apt when he notes that “the comic principle behind The Widow is not poetic justice but poetic grace,” and that the undeserving Ricardo is “saved” through no virtue of his own (“Critical Introduction”). Taylor sees this “poetic grace” as an echo of God’s grace, appropriate to the Christmas season in which the play was originally produced, but we might also remember that Middleton explicitly poked fun at the notion of a rich widow as a vehicle of divine grace back in Michaelmas Term. Ricardo is certainly blessed at the end by some beneficent power, but what kind of power is it and how might his good fortune be seen in the context of what has come before? Juneja, who treats the story of Ricardo and Valeria as a realistic representation of “the heat of some contemporary chases for a widow’s wealth,” makes an observation about the play’s ending which is worth taking further: “[Valeria] finds a proper match in Ricardo when he renounces her wealth – but only, one suspects, because comic conventions demand a successful resolution” (“Widow,” 6, 8). It is, as I will argue, not divine grace but the grace of widow-plot convention that shines upon Ricardo in the last

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scene: the young suitor who most needs her money gets the widow, declaring his ability to give her “love” in exchange. And more importantly, what makes this last-minute application of convention noteworthy is that everything about the plot which it concludes works to make it possible for the audience to be wiser than the convention, comically exposing the machinations of the playwright who manipulates his characters to produce the fantasy match of widow and wastrel. Undermining the pattern of audience identification with the suitor that typically works in a widow-wooing scenario, Middleton makes a match between Valeria and Ricardo seem as undesirable as possible. He exposes, quite explicitly, the lusty widow stereotype as a male construction that compensates for a suitor’s anxiety over entering an economic relationship which threatens his masculinity. He mocks this anxiety itself, and even justifies a widow’s right to produce it, for Valeria clearly deserves to control her wealth and herself, and Ricardo does not conquer her by sexuality, by wit, or by any of the ways in which the suitor traditionally demonstrates his superior “right” to the widow’s property. Middleton also draws attention to the theatre in its role as pander to an audience’s desires, and when the play ultimately goes through the theatrical motions of providing the match which the fantasy demands, he invites the audience to see exactly what is happening and to realize that they, like Valeria, have been coerced by convention – this time, the ubiquitous theatrical obligation of applause at the end of a play – into accepting a thoroughly dubious match. By the time Valeria embraces Ricardo as her husband, it is clear that she is revealing nothing about the nature or inclinations of widows, and much about a stage-play world constructed wholly by men and frequently for men. From the outset, the play denies Ricardo the attractive characteristics that generally mark the successful young suitor of a rich widow. He is young, bankrupt, and aggressive, but has none of the traits that are useful for getting a young bankrupt on an audience’s good side: Spendall’s naive goodheartedness and prodigal generosity (Tu Quoque), Tharsalio’s unerring clear-sightedness into human behavior (Widow’s Tears), the elaborate, hilarious schemes of disguise and impersonation cooked up by the ready wits of Bould or William Smalshankes (Amends, Ram Alley). Ricardo, rather, is the kind of man who rejoices at being bailed out of arrest but never thinks to request bail for his friends as well, and when they remind him, does it so reluctantly and half-heartedly that it is no surprise he is refused (2.2.99–116). As for clear-sightedness, he entirely misjudges the widow’s susceptibility to sexual innuendo, while his trick to entrap her into marriage is simple and underhanded rather than entertainingly witty: he has two

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hidden witnesses overhear her give her “hand and faith” (2.1.73) to marry a man who loves her for herself, and then insists the statement constitutes a promise to marry him. Instead of winning the widow by his own resources, or enlisting aid from a witty young companion, Ricardo seeks to uphold his trap through a prolonged lawsuit, in which he is backed by the rich and elderly Second Suitor. Any number of earlier widow-wooing plots would have shown Middleton ways to make Ricardo attractive while still playing up his aggression, audacity, taste for obscene innuendo, and obsession with the widow’s money. He elects, however, not to use them, instead letting those same characteristics appear quite unattractive. The first scene in which Ricardo appears thus works less to endear him to the audience than it does to set up what may be seen as two important lenses through which one may view the action to come. First, the scene lays bare the relationship between the image of the rich, lustful widow, sexually aggressive wooing, and a suitor’s insecurity about seeking to marry a woman socially and financially his superior. While Ricardo would be the last man to give heed to moralists, he is still uncomfortably aware of the dangers of which William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622) warns as awaiting the man who marries in disregard of “equalitie in outward estate and wealth”: “if a rich woman mary a poore man, she will looke to be the master, and to rule him: so as the order which God hath established will be cleane perverted: and the honour of mariage laid in the dust” (190). This particular kind of disorder, needless to say, had no more appeal to the worldly man than to the pious. Secondly, the scene explicitly draws attention to itself and to the plot it initiates as a piece of theatre determined by theatrical conventions. To return to the first point, Ricardo’s opening speech reveals, beneath its apparently confident tone, a certain uneasiness about his financial dependence on the widow he plans to marry: Nay, mark, mark it Francisco; it was the naturallest courtesy that ever was ordained; A young gentleman being spent, to have a rich widow set him up again. To see how fortune has provided for all mortality’s ruins! your college for your old-standing scholar, your hospital for your lame-creeping soldier, your bawd for your mangled roarer, your open house for your beggar, and your widow for your gentleman; (1.2.1–8)

To begin with, the sexual quibble of “spent . . . set up” strikes the keynote for what Ricardo will continue to do – with escalating insistence – throughout the rest of this scene: that is, he compensates for his discomfort over the wealth and social status he lacks by shifting the focus to his sexual capacities. Ricardo is “spent” – bankrupt – and needs the widow to “set him up” by

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repairing his fortunes, but to maintain his bravado such a statement must be couched in terms that depict the widow as taking sexual pleasure in both his “spendings” and his “setting up.” All but the first of the analogies which follow, however, suggest that he approaches the widow’s “courtesy” with a certain amount of reluctance and distaste, for a “bawd,” a “hospital” (with its contemporary connotations of poverty and charity), or an open house for beggars are all remedies of last resort, scarcely more agreeable than the griefs they assuage. A similar analogy, with even more uneasy undertones of financial dependence, appears a few lines later: And as at a sheriff ’s table, – O blest custom! – A poor indebted gentleman may dine, Feed well and without fear, and depart so, So to her lips, fearless I come and go. (1.2.49–52)

Again Ricardo puts a sexual spin on the notion of his “feeding” off the widow’s substance, but Middleton’s audience would also have known that the indebted gentlemen who fed at a sheriff’s table – that is, on his leftovers – were men living on charity in debtors’ prisons (Levine, Introduction and Notes, 143 n. 43). To Ricardo’s mind, the widow’s household offers an equivocal haven – a place where his material needs are met, but where he is also faced with the imprisonment of marriage and threatened with subjection to the ruling power. Faced with this potential threat to his masculine authority, Ricardo seeks reassurance from another facet of his masculinity, his sexual prowess. The compensatory technique is made particularly explicit in one exchange: fr anc i sco: I protest, sir, I should not have the face, though, to come to a rich widow with nothing. ricardo : Why, art thou so simple as thou makest thy self? dost think, i’faith, I come to a rich widow with nothing? franc i sco : I mean with state not answerable to her’s. (1.2.28–33)

Ricardo knows very well that Francisco is talking about the inequality between his “state” and Valeria’s – the word is suggestive of not only “estate” or property, but of a respectable manner of living, and of “status” or position among one’s peers – but he insists that his virility, his “thing,” is a satisfactory substitute for the “state” he lacks, canceling out the ignominy of coming to a rich widow with “nothing.” Having established how Ricardo relies on his virility to bolster his courage in approaching the widow, Middleton goes on to show exactly how this

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sexual compensation translates into the kind of sexually aggressive, even violent, courtship with which a young suitor conventionally wins a rich widow. The scene sets up a little play within the play as Ricardo (who boasts of having bedded a thousand women) invites the inexperienced Francisco to “make me your woman” (1.2.79) and to practise on him the speeches with which he wishes to seduce Philippa, the wife of an old Justice. The playacting begins with Ricardo in the female role, but when Francisco objects that the woman he portrays is unrealistically accommodating (a point to which I shall return shortly) the two men switch roles, with Francisco playing the kind of aloof and inaccessible lady that answers better to his experience. At first, Ricardo is able to keep his sense of reality separate from Francisco’s impersonation – “A scornful gom! and at the first dash too! My widow never gave me such an answer” (1.2.118–19) – but he is rapidly sucked into the fiction, first identifying Francisco’s generic scornful lady with the widow, and eventually crossing the boundary between makebelieve and reality to the extent that he perceives Francisco as Valeria herself. Growing steadily angrier and more determined to succeed as Francisco politely rebuffs him, Ricardo is pushed over the edge into sexual aggression when Francisco reminds him of the “woman’s” superiority, insulting his poverty and lack of social prestige: “Hang thee, base fellow!” (1.2.127). Touched on his sore point, Ricardo erupts: Now, by this light, he thinks he does’t indeed! Nay, then, have at your plum-tree! faith, I’ll not be foiled. –Though you seem to be careless, madam, as you have enough wherewithal to be, yet I do, must, and will love you. (1.2.128–32)

Uneasily aware that Valeria’s “wherewithal” entitles her to treat him with contempt, he reacts by physically forcing his “love” on her (the dialogue suggests a violent embrace, bringing the two actors to the ground), constructing her as a “quean,” someone he can “have much ado with,” a mere woman who can be kissed into submission, all images which bring her down from the pedestal of social superiority and endow him with sexual power: r i c ardo : What a pestilent quean’s this? I shall have much ado with her, I see that. –Tell me, as you’re a woman, lady, what serve kisses for but to stop all your mouths? f r anc i sco: Hold, hold, Ricardo! r i c ardo: Disgrace me, widow? f r anc i sco: Art mad? I’m Francisco. at t i li o: Signor Ricardo, up, up! r i c ardo: Who is’t? Francisco?

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f r a n c i s co: Francisco, quotha! what, are you mad, sir? r i c a rd o: A bots on thee, thou dost not know what injury thou hast done me; I was i’the fairest dream. This is your way now, and you can follow it. f r a n c i s co: ’Tis a strange way, methinks. (1.2.134–44)

Ricardo’s “fairest dream,” from which he is loathe to be wakened, is precisely the dream, or fantasy, which the theatre has conventionally promulgated: that a rich widow is mastered by the suitor whose sexual aggression can most stir her lust. But here, even within the fiction of The Widow, this dream does not pass for reality. It takes place, instead, within an explicit piece of playacting, complete with a young male “actor” who, at least to Ricardo’s active imagination, plays a woman so convincingly that even a costume is unnecessary. Moreover, the entire scene is full of meta-theatrical allusions, repeated reminders to the audience that what they are watching is written by a playwright, performed by a company of actors, and marketed by a theatre to a paying public.20 Ricardo refers to Francisco as “as likely a fellow as any is in the company” (1.2.13–14), and jokes that the young man would be tongue-tied with bashfulness if he, Ricardo, were to change his costume and “put on a farthingale” (1.2.84–85). Stating that he will modulate his female impersonation so as not to make Francisco forget his lines in confusion or arousal – “I shall put him out at first else . . . If he be not out now, I’ll be hanged!” (1.2.95, 103) – Ricardo draws attention to the actors, the script and its author. The dialogue thus prepares the audience for a point toward the end of the scene where Middleton lays bare The Widow’s approach to the fantasy of profiting from a widow’s lust. Having been pulled off Francisco and brought out of his “fairest dream” of sexual conquest, Ricardo grumbles, Learn you to play a woman not so scornfully then; For I am like the actor that you spoke on: I must have the part that overcomes the lady, I never like the play else. Now your friendship, But to assist a subtle trick I ha’ thought on, And the rich widow’s mine within these three hours. (1.2.145–50)

Ricardo is speaking about actors, but when he says “I never like the play else” the implication of these lines shifts suddenly to the audience, that entity whose pleasure in the playhouse is crucial. As the prologue insists, “to make you gay, / Is all th’ambition ’t has; and fullest aim / Bent at your

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smiles, to win itself a name.” If a playwright is to cater to conventional tastes, Ricardo’s lines imply, the widow must be more accommodating than Francisco’s “scornful” impersonation, and the young suitor must “have the part that overcomes the Lady.” The play suggests that it will provide its audience all this before they leave the theatre – “the rich widow’s mine within these three hours” – but by breaking open the illusion to show the conventions at work, it lifts the audience above the fantasy, above those who would accept it as a truth about widows and above the plays which purvey it as such. The scene contains yet another meta-theatrical reference to satisfying an audience, which has a similar effect. Observing Valeria’s egalitarian reception of suitors both rich and poor, Ricardo is pleased by the thought of the widow as pliable and without volition, a “gift” willing to be bestowed by fortune on whomever fortune chooses: Sh’as told him [the second Suitor] thus, those that profess love to her Shall have the liberty to come and go, Or else get him gone first; she knows not yet Where fortune may bestow her, she’s her gift, Therefore to all will show a kind respect. (1.2.43–47)21

Valeria, as the play will shortly reveal, is very far from the kind of widow who will passively allow herself to be seized by whomever is neediest and most virile. But even before we meet Valeria the scene adds a comment on where such images of the yielding widow come from, for shortly after making this speech Ricardo himself begins to play exactly the kind of easily-wooed woman he spoke of. When Francisco objects that his portrayal is unrealistic – “one shall seldom meet with a lady so kind as thou playedst her” (1.2.108–09) – Ricardo replies “Not altogether, perhaps: he that draws their pictures must flatter ’em a little; they’ll look he that plays ’em should do’t a great deal then” (1.2.110–12). The joke here is that what Ricardo believes women in the audience would consider a flattering depiction of their sex is in fact what he thinks women ought to be like. His ideal woman is sexually “kind” and acquiescent to her suitor’s desires, whereas the women of the audience would be more likely to consider such a woman to be both unwary and unchaste, hardly the way they would wish to be thought of. And it is a joke which draws attention to the fact that “women” on stage may be drawn without reference to or understanding of actual women’s perceptions of their sex’s behavior. Instead, female characters such as Valeria and the stage widows before her are crafted, acted, and manipulated by

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men – “he that plays ’em” and he that writes them or “draws their pictures” in a play script. Indeed, the spectacle of Ricardo and Francisco impersonating ladies draws attention to the boy actors beneath all the play’s “women.” The accuracy with which men can portray women is made fun of in Ricardo’s self-interested misunderstanding of what should “flatter ’em”; but men, as comically exaggerated by Ricardo’s all-too-thorough suspension of disbelief when Francisco plays a woman, are also liable to take these male theatrical constructions of women for true representations of the real thing. By bringing these issues out in the open, The Widow invites its audience not to make Ricardo’s mistake. When Valeria first appears on stage, however, she is very much as a woman may wish to be played. Her first speech shows her to be witty and straightforward, mixing sound moral sense with a healthy, humorous cynicism about men. Amused and disgusted by a “spic’d coxcomb” who came to court her with “his right worshipful idolatrous face / . . . most fearfully painted” (2.1.4–6), she reveals her own refusal to wear makeup as an attractive mixture of Christian virtue and a self-assured integrity that scorns to cater to men’s desires: I’m a woman; Yet, I praise heaven, I never had th’ambition To go about to mend a better workman, She ever shames her self i’th’ end that does it. He that likes me not now as heaven made me, I’ll never hazard hell to doe him a pleasure; Nor lie every night like a woodcock in paste To please some gaudy goose in the morning A wise man likes that best that is itself, Not that which only seems, though it look fairer. (2.1.11–20)

She reveals, moreover, that there is a shrewd reason and a good dose of suspicion behind the behavior that has led Ricardo to view her as passive and yielding: Heaven send me one that loves me, and I’m happy! Of whom I’ll make great trial ere I have him, Though I speak all men fair, and promise sweetly: I learn that of my suitors; ’tis their own, Therefore injustice ’twere to keep it from ’em.22 (2.1.21–25)

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What is most remarkable about Valeria as a stage widow, though, is that despite her avowed intention to remarry with “one that loves [her],” she does not at any time betray the least amount of lust. Her speech throughout the play is free from a widow’s usual bawdy double entendres that imply unconscious desires; she does not express admiration for comely men, nor state that she finds any of her suitors attractive, nor utter a single “beshrew my blood!” or any other remark suggestive of sexual longing. Her wish to remarry is presented as an unremarkable fact, and her only criteria are that her husband be loving and not mercenary, not that he fill the usual requirements of the youngest, the handsomest, the boldest, and the most promising in bed. As Valeria in no way takes a moral stance against sexuality, her complete lack of the signs of lust does not work to suggest that a “good” widow is without appetite, but rather to throw into relief Ricardo’s insistence on imagining her as desirous.23 Where he believes himself to be playing on her susceptibilities, he is in fact addressing himself to a lusty widow who does not exist. He enters to Valeria with an elaborate and gratuitous double entendre, beginning his greeting in mid-sentence for the purpose of adding, “I always desire, when I come to a widow, to begin i’th’ middle of a sentence; for I presume she has a bad memory of a woman that cannot remember what goes before” (2.1.28–31). He again tries to draw her attention to his genitals when he assures her that “having me, you’ve the truth of a man; all that you see of me is full mine own, and what you see or not see, shall be yours: I ever hated to be beholding to art, or to borrow anything but money” (2.1.53–56). And to accentuate his own virility, he threatens to castrate his painted rival, swearing “Do but show him me, widow, and let me never hope for comfort, if I do not immediately geld him, and grind his face upon one o’th’ stones” (2.1.42–44). Valeria, in keeping with her characterization at the start of the scene, tolerates him with a kind of mocking amusement, teasing him with insinuations of effeminacy – “Stay, stay sir; let me look upon you well; Are not you painted too?” (2.1.32–33) – and deflecting his outrageous boast with the dry rejoinder, “suffices you’ve express’d me your love and valour, / And manly hate ’gainst that unmanly pride” (2.1.45–46). In Valeria’s presence, as in his earlier scene with Francisco, Ricardo turns to sexual innuendo as a crutch to support him against the threat of the widow’s financial superiority and independence. When she remarks on his unpaid debts, he boldly invites her to do herself a favor and pay them (by marrying him), conflating her supposed “will” to help him out of debt with “will” in its carnal sense:

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r i c a rd o: What matter is’t? if you be pleased to do’t for me, I hold it as good. va l e r i a: Oh, soft you, sir, I pray! r i c a rd o: Why, i’faith, you may, and you will. va l e r i a: I know that, sir. r i c a rd o: Troth, and I would have my will then, if I were as you: there’s few women else but has. (2.1.58–64)

As Valeria reminds him that her “will” is to marry a man who loves her for herself and not for her wealth (a position from which the little exchange about debts has just disqualified him), she unwittingly falls into his trap, pledging her “hand and faith” to marry “him that does the thing you wish for” (2.1.69–73). Francisco and Attilio then emerge from hiding to uphold Ricardo’s claim that her words constitute a betrothal to him, leaving Valeria no choice but to fight them in court. An independent, knowledgeable woman with enough means to support her case, she has no trouble standing up for what is rightfully hers to control: As for you, gentlemen, I’ll take course against you: You came into my house without my leave; Your practices are cunning and deceitful; I know you not, and I hope law will right me. (2.1.94–97)

Faced with the widow at her most assertive and threatening, Ricardo tries to undermine her with yet another jab at her sexuality: It is sufficient that your husband knows ’em ’Tis not your business to know every man, An honest wife contents herself with one. (2.1.98–100)

His lines turn Valeria’s indignation lewdly against her in an attempt to reduce her to a wife for whom “knowledge” of men is sexually suspect. Here as before, Ricardo’s insistence on sexualizing the widow reveals itself as a tactic to counteract the threat of her power. It is not surprising that he is too proud to sue her “under forma pauperis” (2.1.92) and declares that he would rather rob to pay his lawyers than marry Valeria in the humiliating position of a man dependent on the charity of the court.24 Although the play never takes us inside the courtroom where the lawsuit is being fought, the skirmishes that erupt as the combatants come and go from it are indicative of the disharmony that would plague the match

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Ricardo is suing for, a loveless union of economic unequals. By this point, Ricardo’s legal fees are being paid by the Second Suitor who, annoyed at the First Suitor’s apparent advantage with Valeria, decides to find his “venery” (4.1.24) in wrangling instead of wiving. Ricardo and the Second Suitor (who is also Ricardo’s creditor) enjoy an odd little relationship, part homoerotic and part filial – the older man addresses the younger as both “sweet honey” (2.2.96)25 and “my adoption, / My chosen child” (4.1.19–20) – and Ricardo’s confidence is sufficiently bolstered by his wealthy patron’s support for him to attack Valeria on the financial issues he previously insisted on deflecting into sexual innuendo. Informing her that she is the woman he has “reserv’d for wife,” Ricardo scolds Valeria: r i c a rd o: Now, before conscience, you’re a wilful housewife. va l e r i a: How? r i c a rd o: Ay, and I fear you spend my goods lavishly. va l e r i a: Your goods? r i c a rd o: I shall miss much, I doubt me, when I come to look over the inventory. va l e r i a: I’ll give you my word you shall, sir. r i c a rd o: Look to’t, widow; a night may come will call you to account for’t. (4.1.45–53)

Ricardo’s casual appropriation of the widow’s property and Valeria’s indignation provide a foretaste of the conventional conflict between a rich remarried widow and her poor young husband over who will control the household wealth. Swetnam describes the classic scenario: “if thou make provision to fare well in thy house she will bid thee spend that which thou broughtest thy selfe. If thou shewe thy selfe sparing she will say thou shalt not pinch her of that which is her owne” (60). But here, contrary to the usual portrayal of such conflicts, the widow cannot be dismissed as either an unreasonable old shrew or the deserving victim of her own poor choice. Instead, Middleton shows Valeria to have every right to control her wealth as she sees fit – it is honestly her own and not, like many a comedy-widow’s money, the ill-gotten profits of an unethical first husband, and she is obviously capable of governing it wisely. Ricardo’s presumption to seize it by coercion thus comes off as the height of injustice, not as a right he has won by superior wit or by overwhelming the widow with desire. A marriage between this pair, the play suggests, would be a constant battle for sexual and financial mastery, with Ricardo trying to muscle his way sexually to authority over Valeria’s property and Valeria, not at all susceptible to this approach, firmly aware of what is hers. While Ricardo

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thinks a widow should be amenable to settling financial disagreements in bed – “A night may come will call you to account for’t” – Valeria does not subscribe to the opinion of the contemporary jest-book widow who insisted that she “wolde nat wedde for bodily pleasure” but then refused a husband who “lacketh his privey members” with the explanation that “though I desyre nat the nyce playe: yet I wylle that myne husbande shall have that, where with we may be reconciled, if we falle at variance” (Hazlitt, 95). In The Widow, there is little evidence of love on either side – Valeria expresses not the slightest affection for her suitor before the final scene, while Ricardo’s declarations of love are highly suspect.26 The Second Suitor’s prediction of what their marriage would be like if embittered by poverty (for he sees money as the key to happiness) may well also apply to a couple torn apart by disputes over wealth, only with more “household stuff” as ammunition: Then will they ne’er agree, that’s a sure point; He’ll give her a black eye within these three days, Beat half her teeth out by All-hallowtide, And break the little houshold stuff they have With throwing at one another: O sweet sport! (5.1.356–60)

The audience is thus quite unprepared for the play’s last scene, where the only logic governing the plot’s resolution is the kind which Ricardo invokes back in the first act: For I am like the actor that you spoke on: I must have the part that overcomes the lady, I never like the play else. (1.2.146–48)

Having for the duration of the play allowed Valeria to expose rather than to confirm the stereotype of the stage widow, Middleton suddenly plugs in all the features of a conventionally happy ending, throwing Valeria into the arms of the man she has fought in court to avoid for the past four and a half acts. Valeria in fact wins the lawsuit, and at first seems as relieved as one would expect, sternly informing Ricardo that even if the law had “unfortunately put you upon me, / You’d lost your labour” (5.1.293–94), because she has conveyed her property to Brandino in a deed of gift. The First and Second Suitors then refuse to marry Valeria without her money and lands, but Ricardo, incredibly, agrees to take her in her new state of

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poverty. For a moment, the old, mercenary Ricardo is replaced by a tender, self-sacrificing lover: r i c a rd o: I swore too much To be believ’d so little. va l e r i a: Was it you then? Beshrew my heart for wronging of you! – r i c a rd o: Welcome blessing! Are you mine faithfully now? va l e r i a: As love can make one.27 f i r s t s u i to r: Why, this fills the commonwealth so full of beggars, Marrying for love, which none of mine shall do. (5.1.331–39)

While the audience is still probably blinking in wonderment, Ricardo is miraculously forgiven his debts by the Second Suitor (Valeria refuses to marry if Ricardo is in debt, and the Second Suitor maliciously wishes to further what he believes will be a violently miserable marriage), and Valeria reveals that the supposed deed of gift was but a test of Ricardo’s love: “’twas but a deed in trust, – / And all to prove thee, whom I’ve found most just” (5.1.377–78). The erased debts are reminiscent of William Smalshankes’s fortune in Ram Alley, Spendall’s in Tu Quoque, or Witgood’s in A Trick, but are more purely coincidental than any of these; the love test recalls Wit Without Money, where Lady Hartwell tests Vallentine by announcing she has sold her lands, or Widow Raysby’s equally token test of Spendall, but Ricardo has so thoroughly proved – through the entrapment and the lawsuit, if nothing else – that he is after the widow’s money that the convention of the love test is rendered utterly absurd. As Kathryn Jacobs observes, the sudden romantic twist to the end of this mercenary tale ensures that “the audience is allowed to have their cake and eat it too” (141); the question, though, is whether they can swallow it. By plugging in the conventional ending after spending the play mocking, exposing, and refuting the lusty-widow fantasy, Middleton satirically offers up the fantasy to an audience which may no longer want it and which is now enabled to see how it distorts the multiplicity of widows’ desires and choices into a single mould created out of the interests and anxieties of men. Valeria marries Ricardo not because she is the experienced, unimpassioned, intelligent woman with whom the audience has become acquainted, but because she is a stage widow, faced with a self-proclaimed stage hero who must “overcome” her, and subject to the manipulations of any playwright who, as Middleton implies with this jarring introduction of convention, can push her into a profitable fantasy ending. If Middleton had ended the play with Valeria’s

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rejection of Ricardo, she would merely have proved an exception to the rule. But by marrying her to him, he draws attention to the playwright’s hand behind the scene and exposes the coercive conventions that have made the stage widow a flattened, predictable figure destined to repeatedly fulfill a male fantasy. To point up the play’s final joke of foisting convention upon a nowenlightened audience, Ricardo steps forward with the epilogue: He that without your likings leaves this place, Is like one falls to meat, and forgets grace; And that’s not handsome, trust me, no: Our rights being paid, and your loves understood, My widow and my meat, then does me good. – I ha’ no money, wench, I told thee true, – For my report, pray let her hear’t from you. (5.1.451–57)

Reminding everyone, with his unsavory allusion to feeding off the widow, that he is still as mercenary as he ever was, Ricardo uses theatrical convention to coerce the audience into showing approval of him, just as convention forced the transformation of Valeria from his adversary to his bride. Obliged by the custom of the theatre to clap when the play is over, the audience finds their applause suborned as a recommendation of Ricardo to Valeria. And while some of them, oblivious or resistant to Middleton’s sleight of hand, may willingly applaud Ricardo, others will laugh at the joke on themselves, applauding the cleverness of a play which pokes fun at the anxieties behind the lusty-widow fantasy and at the conventions which pander to them. Although it may seem quite obvious in the context of this study that Tharsalio’s insistence on his Herculean virility or William Smalshankes’s sexually explicit swordplay in Widow Taffata’s chamber are manifestations of the anxious compensation which the rich widow provokes in the young men who court her, such aggression as it appears in The Widow’s Tears, Ram Alley, and numerous other comedies, is naturalized and justified by the widow’s eventual desirous acquiescence in her suitor’s demands. Even when the widow insists on postponing consummation until after marriage – as do Widow Raysby of Greene’s Tu Quoque, and Lady Bright of Amends for Ladies – her avowed desire for the sexually aggressive young man makes his aggression look like a clever tactic to access a widow’s weakness rather than a symptom of the weakness – the emasculation – he fears in and for himself. A Trick to Catch the Old One, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, and The Widow go further, however, than simply presenting a “virtuous”

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widow of this type. Whether his widows are slightly unconventional, like Lady Goldenfleece, resolutely un-lustful, like Valeria, or purely fantastical, like “Widow Medler,” Middleton rings parodic changes on the traditional widow-wooing plot that call attention to the discrepancy between the widow herself and what the suitor fears and desires her to be. As he stages and re-stages versions of the fantasy, watching the plays of his rivals through a parodist’s keen eye and revising old patterns, Middleton’s sleight of hand with this particular convention results in comedies which offer an alternative to the common and degrading belief that a woman’s passion outweighed her reason, subjecting her to the demands of her sexual needs – a myth neatly embodied by the widow whose financial or ethical scruples about a suitor could be overcome with sexual audacity. The aggressive posturings and stereotyping assumptions of Ricardo, of the cross-dressed Kate, and of the horde of mercenary suitors who pursue the non-existent “Widow Medler” become transparent, absurd, a reflection on them rather than on any fixed image of a widow’s “nature.” For a moment, at least, the anxietydriven myths that masquerade as truths about the widow are exposed to laughter. The aim of this book has been to explore these myths, their ideological underpinnings, and the role they played in early modern comedy. The shrewd, confident, but good-natured Valeria and Lady Goldenfleece of Middleton’s later comedies illuminate not only the fiction of the lusty widow, but its attendant anxieties about her behavior as a wife. In the end, I do not want to risk dismantling one stereotype only to naturalize another – to explain away the lusty widow as a male compensatory tactic but uphold the domineering widow as a simple truth. The domestic behavior of remarried widows must have varied as widely as their sexual appetites, and if early modern London seems thickly populated with Margery Gares, stubbornly refusing to concede the power of place, and Anne Middletons, tenaciously keeping their leases out of the hands of impoverished husbands, it is worth remembering that peace and contentment tend to leave few written traces. The point is not whether many or most remarried widows lived up to their popular image as unmanageable wives; it is that that image itself was produced from moments of discomfort with what usually was an accepted fact of life in early modern England: widows were in a position to be more assertive and autonomous than other women. Unlike their Continental counterparts, they were not hedged in by moral prescriptions demanding their celibacy and seclusion, by family control of their children, or by laws restricting what they could financially offer a new husband. They were

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fully expected to arrange their own marriages at all levels of society: if they wanted to marry their apprentices, as did William Lilly’s mistress, or set the police on unwelcome suitors, as Elizabeth Bennett served Dr. Raven, they could, without worrying about irate parents or anything worse than a bit of gossip. They had the support of alliances formed during their earlier marriages: Anne Middleton’s three trustees from the Inner Temple who stood by her through Thomas Harvey’s lawsuits; Margery Gare’s grown sons and neighbors who “greviouslye abused” Christopher Percy when he refused to pay the bills in Clerkenwell. They could, and frequently did, opt out of the full burden of coverture with pre-marital settlements of money for their own unrestricted use, and for every husband whose dissatisfaction with this practice comes down to us in court records or journals, there must have been many more who saw no problem with it. After all, the neighborly outrage generated by the depredations of husbands like Edward Cleter and Henry Carlile suggests that even without a settlement, society granted the widow a certain continuing claim to the wealth that was hers – hers in a way that a maiden’s portion, passed from a father to a husband, never quite belonged to the bride. When Rowley depicts the perfect marriage in A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed, the new husband asks the widow’s permission for his expenditures. A remarried widow could be as generous and gracious as Rowley’s heroine, and there would still be that distinctive balance of power. The culture itself ensured it. Playwrights and prose fiction authors of the period took this dynamic and reflected it back in the simplified form of a paradox. For if this study began by freeing the early modern remarrying widow from the paradox of mercenary pressure and moral prohibition in which modern scholarship has frequently bound her, it leaves the suitor trapped in one of his own. Middleton’s Ricardo, mockingly described as a “Gentleman begger” (2.1.142) needs Valeria’s money if his status in the gentry is to be more than a joke, but envisages the marriage itself in terms of humiliating charity; Chapman’s Tharsalio in The Widow’s Tears stands to gain a dizzying promotion from ex-page to second husband, but a match with the Countess Eudora threatens to reproduce their former relationship of female authority and male subservience. Exactly the same dilemma is articulated by Deloney’s Jack of Newbury, whose widowed mistress makes him head of his former master’s household one day, and sends him to sleep with the apprentices the next. For Vallentine in Wit Without Money, Young Loveless in The Scornful Lady, William Smalshankes in Ram Alley, Spendall in Greene’s Tu Quoque, Lucklesse in The Northern Lasse, the widow’s property is intensely desirable, the widow as wife considerably less so. Marriage, money,

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property, an established household, an instant position as master in one’s craft or trade: the markers of prosperous, respected, male adulthood that literally “made a man” were equivocal goods when offered by the remarrying widow, whose feared inversion of the gendered domestic hierarchy threatened to unmake the manhood that had been so obtained. But if marriage “made a man” in early modern England, so too did sexuality. What the narratives of courtship and remarriage examined in this book most clearly and consistently illuminate is the importance of male sexual prowess to masculine gender identity. Recent scholarship has only begun to explore the complex relationship between sexual behvior and masculinity: the salutary critical estrangement of early modern attitudes towards sexuality, with its counterintuitive revelation that sexual relationships with women were considered effeminizing – even in their most priapic, least “romantic” manifestations – has at times threatened to discount erotic activity altogether as a constitutive factor of what it meant to be a man. It doesn’t take too many widow-wooing comedies to make one realize that potency does matter. From the phallic “naked weapons” that woo and subdue the controlling widows in Tu Quoque and Ram Alley, to the legal fallout from the theatre’s elaborate sexualization of Anne Elsdon in Keep the Widow Waking, the evidence suggests that men sought to empower themselves by deploying the lusty widow stereotype in ways which foregrounded not only the widow’s sexual susceptibility, but their virility – their ability to arouse a woman, satisfy her, even impregnate her. And here, as Keep the Widow Waking so strikingly demonstrates, life and theatre, culture and literature, fed into each other: one could hope to convince the courts that a sixty-two-year-old woman and a twenty-five-year-old man had married for love at least in part because the fictions of the period insisted that her love – her desire for him – was the only love needed. These plays complement Moulton’s discovery of similar criteria in the period’s erotic poetry for sexual activity that enhances, rather than undermines, early modern manhood: the man’s ability to give pleasure to the woman, while evincing conscious control over his own pleasure to ensure appropriate “spending.” For an audience which believed that female orgasm was necessary for conception, Vallentine’s aggressive promise to Lady Hartwell that he “will lie with [her] / And get a whole bundle of babies” (Wit Without Money, 5.4.67–68), or the (punningly named?) Spendall’s assurance that he and his “back / like Hercules” are able to fulfill Widow Raysby’s desire for children (Tu Quoque, 2540–42), place these young men squarely within that definition of success. The almost inevitable childlessness of the remarrying stage widow (the exceptions, like The Phoenix’s Castiza, or The Puritan’s

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Lady Plus, tend not to feature in the more straightforward offerings of the lusty widow fantasy) would seem to benefit the successful suitor erotically as well as economically: not only more potent than his rivals, he is more potent than his predecessor.28 The motif of the rich widow mastered by the man who can best arouse and satisfy her appetite also plays with a version of male sexuality which evades the “double bind” of effeminacy. If “the assumption that a man should naturally take the active role in sexual encounters was fundamental to early modern constructions of masculinity,” yet male sexual pleasure was considered both physically and morally effeminizing (Moulton, 28), and if desire itself was problematic, for “Renaissance thought gendered [lust] feminine, attributed more of it to women, and regarded excessive lust in men as a mark of effeminacy” (Rackin, 74), then we might see the successful courtship of a rich widow as a fantasy of sexual aggression without lust, prowess and potency without pleasure. The texts are typically silent about the widow’s physical charms; the suitor’s desire is purely for the profits of marriage, and the pleasure, quite explicitly, is all hers. She, not he, finds herself subject to the “effeminization” that results from being revealed as weak, lustful, a thrall to erotic pleasures, unable to exercise rational control over her physical urges. She, for all her intimidating wealth and status, has been proved a mere woman, and the suitor, redefining this crucial distinction between them, establishes his own masculinity in proving her so. Or so the fantasy goes. Its limitations and its failures are manifold: it runs up against the reality of recalcitrant individuals like Elizabeth Bennett and Anne Elsdon; it reveals its inadequacy to contain the period’s contradictory currents of ideology about female sexuality and emasculation; it is subject to mockery and parody in the astute comedies of Thomas Middleton. But it persisted nonetheless through the bustling remarriage market of the early seventeenth century, a reminder that our attempts to codify early modern sexuality are inevitably exceeded by the complex and contingent roles it played in the imagination of a culture.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Dr. Raven’s courtship of Elizabeth Bennett is related in Larking xiv–xvi; Rous 34; Fraser 89–92. 2. Throughout this book I will use “lusty” in its obsolete sense of “lustful, lascivious” (OED “lusty” 4); it is the common early modern sense of the word, and – at least when modifying “widow” – a sense very familiar to scholars of the drama. Moreover, “lusty” also meant (as it continues to mean) “strong” and “healthy,” connotations absent from the modern “lustful” and perhaps not irrelevant to the early modern lusty widow stereotype. As I will be arguing against a wholly negative reading of the stereotype, it seems perverse to adopt a term more pejorative and limited than that used by the culture in question. 3. All dates unless otherwise stated are from the Annals of English Drama 975–1700 and are approximate. 4. On widows’ sexuality in Medieval French literature, see Blamires, The Case for Women, 159–62, and Arden; Le Leu’s “La Veuve” and Le F`evre’s re-telling of the “Widow of Ephesus” are reprinted in Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, 135–44 and 185–88. Vasvari discusses Do˜na Endrina and widow stereotypes in Medieval Spanish literature, and claims that the portrayal of the lusty widow is a constant among cultures; a more local approach is taken by Piera and Rogers, who examine the widowed heroine of a fifteenth-century Catalan novel in the context of Catalan inheritance and remarriage customs. Richlin, 194–95 sets Petronius’s version of the Widow of Ephesus story in the general context of his satire on women, but makes what appears to be a common mistake by assuming that the tale “cynically subverts one of the most sacred ideals of Roman womanhood, that a woman should be univira” (195); the same view is found in Walcot, 21. But as Lightman and Zeisel explain, the Roman concept of univira (the wife of one husband) originally referred to once-married women with living husbands, or women who predeceased their husbands; such women were considered the embodiment of good fortune, and participated in weddings and other rituals as a good omen; the term was later appropriated by early Christian moralists to extoll celibate widowhood, a state to which the pagans “attached no great virtue” (27). See also Corbier, who observes that in ancient Rome, “[r]emarriage was the normal future for a widow; it was even required 202

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6.

7. 8.

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by Augustan legislation if she wanted full capacity to inherit” (56). Roman sexual invective against old women, related but not identical to the lusty widow stereotype, is discussed in Richlin, 105–16; Aristophanes’ The Ecclesiazusae stages similarly repulsive and rapacious old women who kidnap a young man for their use; but a different, more positive view of a passionate widow kidnapping a younger man for the purpose of marriage is offered by Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love, discussed by Foucault in The Care of the Self (The History of Sexuality, vol. 3) 193–210. On the Restoration political allegory of Ogilby’s The Ephesian Matron, see Carleton. An early article on widows, Carlton’s “The Widow’s Tale: Male Myths and Female Reality in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England” (1978), seems to have set the trend. See also Juneja, who argues that “Middleton’s plays . . . reveal a sympathetic understanding of the pressures exerted on women” (3), and MacDonald, who concerns himself with the question of “whether the widow appearing in the drama is an accurate reflection of the widow as she existed in real life” (5). Social history also forms the basis for an introductory chapter in Rigaud’s La Veuve dans la com´edie anglaise au temps de Shakespeare 1600–1625, but the book quickly moves on to its real interests in the stage widow’s mythological and archetypal aspects. For a useful critique of the influence that “Shakespeare-centrism” has had on literary scholars’ perceptions of early modern culture, see Hanson. Shakespeare does, in fact, include a comic remarrying widow in The Taming of the Shrew, but the role is too minor to have merited significant critical attention. The individual contributions of the Patient Grissil collaborators, Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, are discussed in Hoy, 143–46. Literary criticism on widows has not been extensive. Kathryn Jacobs’s Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage, with an excellent chapter on the remarrying widow in renaissance drama (133–55), was published after this study was completed; her view of the lusty widow stereotype coincides with mine on several points, particularly in terms of its wish-fulfillment role in what Jacobs aptly terms “the public appetite for vicarious fortune hunting” (145). On tragic widows, see Kehler’s articles on Hamlet’s Gertrude and Titus Andronicus’s Tamora (all references to Kehler in this book are to the former); Wadsworth, Mikesell, and Jardine 68–102 discuss issues of widowhood in The Duchess of Malfi. Widows in comedy are dealt with in two essays by Juneja on Middleton and Chapman; Williamson; Geller; Leinwand 180–86; Cherry 94– 96, and most extensively, in Rigaud. An insightful general analysis of dramatic widows, comic and tragic, is Woodbridge, 177–78, 255–62. There are also several unpublished theses on widows in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by BenselMeyers, Chamberlain, James, MacDonald, and Oakes. A similar argument is made by Mikesell, who claims that both literary portrayals of widows and “didactic tracts which address practice as well as theory” (she cites Alexander Niccholes’s A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving [1615] and Overbury) show that the traditional Catholic antipathy to a woman’s remarriage remained highly influential in the culture despite Protestant teachings (270). Other critics

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allow that some remarriage was sanctioned, but within strict limits: Pearson, 126 observes that families might arrange early remarriages for widowed kinswomen to protect them from “fortune hunters”; Jankowski, 35 suggests that remarriage was approved only for poor widows who risked becoming financial burdens, adding that men found remarriage a threatening reminder of their own mortality and replaceability. 10. Alan Macfarlane (Marriage, 234–36) and Miriam Slater (104–07) agree that remarriage was considered fully acceptable in early modern England. 11. The idea of the lusty widow stereotype as a curb to widows’ freedom appears first in Pearson, 140, and again in MacDonald, 17–18, whom Woodbridge cites. Unlike Woodbridge, Pearson suggests that fear of this slander hurried widows into the protection of second marriages.

1 T H E W I D O W ’S C H O I C E 1. Figures for the decline of female remarriage in the later seventeenth century, along with a lively debate about the reasons for this decline, are found in Todd, “Remarrying Widow,” Boulton, and Todd’s reply to Boulton, “Demographic Determinism”. See also Houlbrooke, 214. The curtailing of widows’ inheritances resulted from the 1670 Act for the Better Settling of Intestate’s Estates; after this statute, the widow’s share of only one third of the estate was strictly enforced. See Erickson, Women and Property, 178–80. 2. See Carlton, 119, 127; Carlton’s reliance upon “an inappropriate geographic context” for his critique of the theatre is corrected by Brodsky, 126. 3. On the variation in laws and customs regarding inheritance, see Stretton, 25–33; Mendelson and Crawford, 178; Houlbrooke, 209–13. On remarriage intervals for widows and widowers in other parts of England, see Wrigley et al., 171–82. 4. A couple who, for the sake of less waiting time or more privacy, wished to dispense with the calling of the banns could purchase a license (usually costing from 3s. 8d. to 10s. 4d.) from the consistory court on the provision of reliable witnesses to swear that no legal or religious impediment to their marriage existed (Cook, 158). 5. While I have been unable to find any statistics on the proportion of early seventeenth-century London spinsters who married men younger than themselves, Elliott’s figures on mean age differences between spouses suggest that the general pattern, as it is today, was of women marrying men older than themselves. The amount by which the husband was older than his never-married wife ranged from an average of fourteen years for London-born spinsters marrying widowers to a few months for migrant spinsters who married lower-status crafts- and tradesmen (84–89). 6. Only among London’s elite does remarriage seem to have been somewhat less common. Adamson’s study of the families of London aldermen, the city’s wealthiest men, found that only a third of 208 aldermen’s widows married again (188; cited in Rappaport, 40). As Boulton points out, however, Adamson’s

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figures are not broken down by age and may refer to a predominantly older as well as richer group of widows (326). In London and Bristol, the mayor and aldermen administered the inheritances of fatherless children. Upon marriage to a widow with children, a man was required to provide this “court of orphans” with sureties that he would give the children their portions when they came of age, or relinquish them if they died in their minority. Refusal to pay, or any other misuse of the inheritance, led to legal prosecution. See Barron, xxv; E. Clark, 176–81. Technically, an apprentice could not improve his status by marrying a companyman’s widow because he was prohibited by City law from marrying within the term of his service. However, records from the Repertories of the Court of Aldermen (Rep. 18, 78v, 1/10/1573; Rep. 18, 389v, 9/6/1575; Rep. 24, 314v, 7/11/1598; Rep. 24, 323v, 16/11/1598; Rep. 48, 37v, 12/12/1633) show that an apprentice who married within his term and thus disqualified himself from obtaining his freedom by apprenticeship could instead purchase his freedom by redemption, customarily paying a fee of five marks (three pounds, six shillings and eight pence). Thus, an apprentice who had found favor with a well-off widow would find it in his interest to break the rules and pay his way out of the remainder of his service. Rappaport notes that there is no evidence to suggest that apprentices commonly defied the rule against their marriage, but he also reports the case of one Humphrey Naylor, who married his late master’s wife after four and a half years of his apprenticeship; paying the redemption fee, Rappaport adds, was presumably not a hardship for Naylor (236–37). I am indebted to Peter Blayney for providing me with the records of married apprentices before the Court of Aldermen. The influence of local custom is evident if we contrast the marriage market for London widows who inherited businesses with remarriage practices in seventeenth-century Dorset, where it was common for an old man whose copyhold tenement would expire on his death to marry a very young woman and arrange for her to share the land with his children during her lengthy widowhood. See Bettey, “Manorial Custom and Widow’s Estate.” Although most companies apparently had no written rules prohibiting the apprenticing of women (the Weavers, however, are known to have officially barred females from the company in 1550), in practice it seems to have been a fairly rare occurrence. Adamson’s study of women in Tudor London, for example, found the names of only seventy-three women among thousands of apprenticeship enrollments from the sixteenth century (Rappaport, 36–37). Mikesell’s evidence for this continued “Catholic” influence on early modern views of the widow is Niccoles, the Overburian characters of “A Vertuous Widdow” and “An Ordinarie Widdow,” and the recurrent contruct of the lusty widow, which she considers “an apparent amalgam of Catholic and Protestant ideas of widowhood” (270). Kehler cites Overbury, More Dissemblers, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s advice to his son (403–04). All of the texts cited by both authors to illustrate the orthodox Catholic view of remarriage are continental.

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Notes to pages 18–23

12. See Jerome’s letters xxxvii “To Marcella,” and liv “To Furia on the duty of remaining a widow” (159–67, 229–65); Ambrose; Chrysostom, 129– 45. 13. The Italian Relation of the Island of England is cited in Macfarlane, Marriage, 236. 14. In early Medieval England, widows were required to pay a fine if they wished to marry a man of their own choice or to remain unmarried rather than to accept a husband chosen for them by their lord. Far from being discouraged from second marriages, then, widows often had to pay to avoid them. By the fifteenth century, such pressures had largely dissipated, and most widows were free to follow their own inclinations. London widows, in all periods, appear to have had more freedom in this matter than their rural counterparts. See Barron xiii–xxxiv; Rosenthal 212–13. 15. See Hanawalt, “Remarriage as an Option” 154–57 for the details of several cases where suitors went to considerable expense to woo a widow and then sued her or various matchmakers when the promised match fell through. 16. Klapisch-Zuber’s work focuses on fifteenth-century Florence, but she observes that the dowry system and its effect on widows was not unique to that city (122). Calvi, who studies widowhood and remarriage in Tuscany from 1580 to 1750, shows that the pressures which family and dowry customs placed on Italian widows were still active at a later date (279). 17. See Erickson, Women and Property, 119–22 on the recouping of portion through jointure (a widowhood annuity settled on a bride at the time of marriage); at a lower social level, widows who did not receive the bulk of their husband’s estate were often willed back the goods they brought into the marriage (162). Erickson observes that “the expectation that a woman took out of marriage what she took into it seems remarkably consistent over time” (122). 18. Chaytor further cites an article on early modern Germany, and E. P. Thompson’s “The Grid of Inheritance: a Comment.” The latter does discuss English custom but, regarding charivari, offers only an unsupported parenthetical remark concerning a case in which a widow’s remarriage risked impoverishing her children: “One wonders whether it was cases of marriage of this kind which would have been the particular occasion of rough music in England and charivari in France?” (350). Janet Thompson’s additional sources are Keith Thomas and Antonia Fraser. Thomas merely observes that “unsuitably matched couples” were sometimes subjected to charivari (“The Place of Laughter,” 77), while Fraser’s discussion of widows does not mention the practice at all. 19. See also Underdown, 121, 127–34; Macfarlane, Marriage, 236; Todd, “Remarrying,” 80. 20. In England, it seems that the blessing was originally withheld from both widows and widowers (although St. Thomas Aquinas believed that it should be withheld from widows only, on the analogy that the wife represented the soul in its union with Christ). In 1370, however, Archbishop Whittesley, “probably as a result of public feeling, permitted the blessing of any marriage in which

Notes to pages 25–27

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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one of the partners had not previously received this special blessing” (Burnley, 22–23). See, for example, Mahler, who writes that “Overtly Italophobic worldmaking . . . opens up the possibility of covert thematisation of indigenous problems; what normally had to remain on the margins of early modern official discourse can now be brought into the centre. . . . Elizabethan and Jacobean stage Italies can thus be understood as imaginary complements to the complex realities of early modern England. Their semantic content is a significantly heterogeneous amalgamation of a projected early sixteenth-century Italy, of a negated late sixteenth-century England, and of the dramatic tradition of the Vice which manages to combine the two aspects of fascination and horror with which the English experience the ‘radical change’ of Renaissance society” (51–52). I do not wish to disagree – only to suggest that care should be taken in distinguishing “projected Italy” from “negated England” in any particular play. On The Duchess of Malfi, see Leech, 69–76, 106–08; Peterson, 62–63. On More Dissemblers, see Schoenbaum, 13; Rowe, 157; Hassel, 89–90. As Mikesell explains, genre ensures that the Protestant views of remarriage upheld in The Duchess of Malfi cannot ultimately triumph: “The appropriate dramatic vehicle for representing the Protestant insistence on the social power of matrimony is romantic comedy, where the marriage(s) of the protagonists can suggest, or be accompanied by, the reformation of society (as seen, for instance, in As You Like It). Following a different trajectory altogether, tragedy as a genre operates within constraints that are incompatible with this part of Protestant doctrine. Its conventions cast attention backward on the old society rather than forward onto the new” (275). Pointing to Vives, Mikesell describes the tradition of a widow’s surveillance by her family as “Catholic”; I would suggest that it is also distinctly Mediterranean. Geller, 299 mentions the connection between Vives’s teachings and the Duchess’s chaste seclusion. On the seclusion of widows, see also chapter 5 of Vives’s section on widows, “How they shall behave themselves abroad”: the widow is advised to dismiss her male servants and instead “take unto her some wel aged woman, wise and vertuous” (sig. Dd1r), or better yet, to move in with her husband’s parents, for “the discipline of chastity is reckoned more straite amongst aliaunce than kinsfolks: because there is lesse cherishing and liberty” (sig. Dd1v). While Vives recognizes that the widow must occasionally venture out in public, “The surest is not to goe much abroad: and when she goeth, to be companied with some good and sad woman” (sig. Dd2v); “chastitie,” he adds, “requireth solitarines, and a chast woman desireth secretnes” (sig. Dd4r). Vives’s emphasis on seclusion is not confined to widows: a virgin, too, “should go but sildome abroad: because she hath small busines foorth, and standeth ever in jeopardie of her chastitie” (sig. B4v), while “[i]t is becoming for married women to go less abroad than maids” (sig. U1r). Other Spanish moralists are equally insistent on the need to physically enclose women within the home (Perry, 68–69), giving detailed

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27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

Notes to pages 33–39

instructions quite unlike the commonplace warnings against “gadding” that feature in English conduct books. Significantly, Brathwait breaks with Vives in his English Gentlewoman to observe that “in my Judgement . . . a modest and wellbehaved woman may by her frequent resort to publike places conferre no less benefit to such as observe her behaviour; than occasion a profit to her private family” (298; cited in Fissell, 444). The Catholic Church was commonly imaged as a whore in early modern Protestant discourse. For example, part of the extended subtitle of Andrew Willet’s anti-Catholic Synopsis Papismi, which went through five editions between 1592 and 1634, promises “an antidotum or counterpoyson out of Scripture against the Whore of Babylon’s filthy cup of abominations.” Useful comparative analyses of Catholic versus Protestant doctrine concerning remarriage are found in Greaves, 191–95; Geller, 292–97; Mikesell, 266–70. See also Perkins, 67–68, who explains that it is acceptable for even a clergyman to marry a widow. One apparent exception to this rule is the inclusion in pro-woman controversy literature, like Heale’s 1609 An Apologie for Women, 8–9 and Newstead’s 1620 An Apology for Women: Or Womens Defence, 24–26, of encomia of Classical and foreign widows who kill themselves to follow their husbands in death. Oakes cites such authors to prove contemporary idealization of the chaste widow, adding that widows were meant to take “a slightly less drastic ideal” (i.e., perpetual chastity) as their model (49–52). Remarkably, however, the authors themselves do not draw this seemingly obvious connection, nor use their praise of Classical suicides and Indian suttee to recommend an analogous but milder faith to the English widow. It is difficult, then, to know how to take these encomia, and it is possible that their effect, if not their intent, might have been the opposite from that which Oakes suggests: faithfulness to a dead husband, they may imply, requires extraordinary measures or is a bizarre foreign habit, unthinkable to emulate; ordinary Englishwomen remarry. For biographical details of Moulsworth’s life, see R. C. Evans. Moulsworth’s own marginal note here refers the reader to Ecclesiastes 4.2, “Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive”; one wonders whether she had a suitor at the time she wrote the poem, and added this note for his benefit. Macfarlane, Marriage, 233 makes a similar point about Overbury’s “Vertuous Widdow” applying primarily to widowed mothers. A descriptive analysis of Page’s manuscript is found in Todd, “Virtuous Widow,” 70–75. On the testamentary safeguarding of children’s portions, see Brodsky, “Widows,” 145, and Erickson, Women and Property, 166–69. It is worth noting that widowers, too, were sometimes urged not to remarry for the sake of their children: see chapter 5 of The Court of Good Counsell (1607), and especially Newnham (1590) passim. Despite a wife’s lack of legal rights to her husband’s property, her influence and control were clearly still something to be reckoned with.

Notes to pages 40–53

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36. Although Annals assigns A New Wonder a date of 1625, Cheatham, 19–23 presents convincing evidence that it was composed approximately a decade earlier. 37. See Levin, 50 n.25, who refers to the “never-vexed Widow” and the “ever-vexed Mistress Foster” as “comic extremes,” albeit one more amiable than the other. 2 T H E W I D O W ’S T H R E A T 1. While warnings against loveless matches for wealth were commonplace, premarital economic considerations (of a kind that would today be viewed as calculating) were expected and approved: see Cook, 120; Greaves, 195; Gowing, 167–71. The candid, matter-of-fact tone in which contemporary men like Whythorne, (150–51) and Sir John Eliot, (14–23) discuss the financial side of courting a widow – in autobiography, in correspondence, and to the woman herself – suggests the complete respectability of such proceedings. 2. See also Amussen, “Christian Man” 216–17, who describes how “for the many men who were subordinate in the social system because of either age, status, or both, it was impossible to be a ‘real man’.” 3. Smith is cited in Thomas, “Age and Authority,” 226; Sowernam in Matchinske, 102; “The Lamentation of a New Married Man” in Foyster, Manhood, 46. All three scholars stress the centrality of marriage to male status. For a discussion of the “transformations” that marriage effected in the social status of both sexes, see Cressy, 286–92. 4. See, for instance, “A Hee-Divell” (1630) and “I tell you, John Jarret, you’l breake”(1630) (Rollins, Garland, 332–41). 5. See also The Parlament of Women (1640), in which “the merry Lawes by them newely enacted . . . [to] live in more Ease, Pompe, Pride, and wantonnesse” include a string of material luxuries with which wives must be provided (sig. A7r–A7v). 6. For discussions of the changing nature and status of women’s work, see Erickson’s introduction to A. Clark, vii–xxii; Fletcher, 223–55; Vickery, 401–14; Cahn, 33–63; Shepherd, 41–51. The notion of early modern England’s transition from a peasant society to a capitalist one is analyzed and critiqued in Macfarlane, Origins. 7. See Cahn, 92–94. Cahn’s comparison of Lady Margaret Hoby’s household work at her country estate and in London illustrates the extent to which the city transformed women from producers to consumers. 8. Anti-patriarchal discontent, and male urges to evade the marital burdens of financial (and moral) responsibility, are brilliantly analyzed in Orlin’s chapter on “Domestic Abdications” in Othello and A Yorkshire Tragedy (191–245) and in Purkiss’s discussion of “bachelor masculinity” in Swetnam (73–78). 9. Purkiss notes that “women’s capacity to spend money” is “a particular concern in the section on widows” (74; 97 n.14). As I explain, the concern in this section is perhaps more accurately described as the widow’s curtailment of men’s capacity to spend money.

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Notes to pages 54–64

10. For other conduct-book examples of advice not to marry a widow, see A Glasse for Householders (1542, sig. C6r) and The Court of Good Counsel (1607, sig. B8v–C1r). 11. Beck’s list of “English Prodigal Son Plays” (121–22) includes six of the plays discussed in this study: A Trick to Catch the Old One; Michaelmas Term; Ram Alley; Greene’s Tu Quoque; Wit Without Money; and A New Way to Pay Old Debts. 12. The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1594) – which contains one of the earliest examples of a comic remarrying widow I have found – also briefly makes use of assumptions about a remarried widow’s willfulness, presenting her as a foil to the supposedly ideal maiden Bianca, and to Kate as reformed shrew. Tired of the drawn-out difficulties involved in wooing Bianca, Hortensio opts for the easy route, “a lusty widow . . . / That shall be wooed and wedded in a day” (4.2.50–51). He does so, however, in the expectation that he will have to “tame” her (4.2.53), and predictably he fails. The widow proves to be the least obedient wife of the three: in the husbands’ contest of wifely submission, Kate comes at her husband’s bidding, Bianca politely sends word that “she is busy and she cannot come,” but the widow wishes her husband to obey her, returning the message that “She will not come. She bids you come to her” (5.2.96). 13. Keyishian argues that “patience wins the day” in the subplot as well as the main plot (260); Bronfman claims Gwenthyan agrees to make Sir Owen her head, but describes the play’s resolution as “troubling” and “unsatisfactory” (219). Neither critic notes that Gwenthyan effectively unsays this promise directly after she makes it (5.2.290–92). Comensoli, Levin, and McLuskie see the subplot as undermining the main plot: Comensoli believes it is intended to do so (209–10), Levin sees it as a structural weakness (50–51), and McLuskie describes it as a “strand of resistance” not quite contained by the comic conclusion (103– 04). See also Hoy (143) and Pechter (86), who note the plots’ contrasts without commenting on their effect. 14. This point is also made within the play by Julia, Gwalter’s unmarried sister, who condemns both marriages and decides to remain single. Julia, however, is rather too stridently anti-marriage in the tradition of the scornful maiden (for instance, she is glad to see Grissil tormented by Gwalter as it serves her right for giving up her “sweet libertie”) to be seen as a purely objective commentator. See 4.3.204–14. 15. The chapbook and other early modern versions of the Griselda story, featuring an assortment of morals, are discussed by Bronfman. 16. See also Cioni, 165–66, who notes that “[b]y the late sixteenth century, it was becoming popular for a widow to have an estate in trust to her separate use especially when circumstances indicated that the next spouse might be grasping or a spendthrift.” 17. As Stretton explains, “widows . . . were the only class of women whose share of litigation came near to matching (and at times may have exceeded) the level of their presence in society”; although widows constituted somewhat less than 9 percent of the total female population in early modern England, they made up almost half of all female litigants in Requests, Common Pleas, and Queen’s bench, and around 5 or 6 percent of the total number of litigants in

Notes to pages 64–77

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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these courts. For many women, widowhood was their first taste of economic and legal independence, and they made use of it in the courts to take care of everything from their necessary duties as executrixes and administratrixes to the recovery of decades-old debts for which they had been unwilling or unable to sue under their husbands’ names (108–14). Although Swinburne’s treatise was not published until 1686, it was written some time before his death in 1623, describing laws and customs then current. Sokol and Sokol cite a date of around 1600 (97). For a full account of the disputes between Anne and Thomas Harvey, see the articles by Christian, Eccles, and Phialas. See, for example, Ostovich, 48; Juneja, “Eve’s Flesh,” 351; Leggatt, Ben Jonson, 69; Dessen, Jonson’s, 216. For “mad” meaning “enraged with lust” see under “mad” in Partridge. I have here focused entirely on what Quarlous can expect from Purecraft. For what Purecraft can expect from Quarlous, see James, “Ben Jonson’s Way,” 31, who sees the widow’s entrapment in a mercenary marriage as poetic justice for the mercenary marriages she has arranged. A more positive view of the match is taken by Juneja, “Eve’s Flesh,” 352. All of the Consistory Court cases discussed in this chapter are catalogued by Giese. The house evidently did not accrue to Christopher on his marriage, for he reports “havinge noe interest in the howse . . . of Clarkenwell butt att ye pleasure of Mr Branyfield” (688). Whately’s A Bride-bush gives seventeen pages of instruction for the husband, compared to only seven for the wife. For other prescriptions of male domestic responsibility, see Gouge, 349–426; Perkins, 163–73; Griffith, 393–412; Ste. B, 8–12. Lessius, whose Catholic tract aims at encouraging celibacy, evidently feels that the onerousness of male marital responsibility is a persuasive argument for his cause (110–11). 3 T H E S U I T O R ’S F A N T A S Y

1. Rollins, Garland, 231. The ballad is titled “A Proverb old, yet nere forgot, / Tis good to strike while the Irons hott, Or, Counsell to all Young men that are poore, / To Marry with Widowes now while there is store.” 2. See, for instance, Schoenbaum, 326–28; Parrott, 805; Weidner, 526–32; Corballis, 34–35. Some critics inexplicably blacken the two women beyond what the play seems to warrant, forgetting that Eudora is a widow and that Cynthia truly believes herself to be one: after describing Eudora’s capitulation as demonstrating “the universal fickleness of feminine virtue” (“Social Disorder,”354), Tricomi refers to Cynthia’s “betrayal of the marriage vow” (356); Kreider lists both Eudora and Cynthia under the category of “faithless wives” (84–85); Williamson, though taking a more lighthearted view of the play, sees contemporary comic taste for “the faithless widow” as an extension of the taste for comedies about cuckolded husbands and adulterous wives (35–36). Tricomi’s recent insightful treatment of surveillance in The Widow’s Tears

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

Notes to pages 78–86 (in Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts through Cultural Historicism) resembles his earlier article in its conflation of widowed celibacy with simple “chastity.” Agreement that the play presents remarriage as morally reprehensible coexists with a number of conflicting views as to the target of Chapman’s satire: Schoenbaum and Parrott believe the play is a misogynist diatribe against the women; Weidner and Tricomi read it as an attack on Tharsalio’s values, while Corballis sees Lysander as the primary target. For the latter reading, see Bliss, 170; Herring, 160–61; Juneja, “Widowhood,” 171–73. This approach argues that Chapman sympathetically understands and opposes “the prejudice against the remarriage of widows . . . which we know did exist in this period” (Herring, 161); the women thus experience a fortunate fall into self-knowledge, breaking life-denying societal restrictions to acknowledge natural, sexual needs. Bliss, however, differs from Herring and Juneja by seeing only Eudora’s capitulation as fortunate, and argues that Tharsalio’s manipulation of Lysander and Cynthia has “disastrous” results which distance the audience from Tharsalio over the second half of the play (179). As subsequent discussion will show, I agree with Bliss that there is a significant difference between Eudora’s “fall” and Cynthia’s, but believe that the audience maintains its comic identification with Tharsalio to the end. Oakes explains the lusty widow stereotype as a figment of impecunious suitors’ imaginations, giving them a fantasized “edge” in trading their sexual services for her money (91); she does not explore, however, how this fantasy may be complicated by male anxiety, nor does she investigate the connections between the imaginary desirous widow and the concept of the remarried widow as unmanageable wife. For an excellent discussion of passion and effeminacy in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, see Breitenberg, 35–68. The link between male sexual activity and effeminacy has led some scholars to disregard the importance of sexual potency to early modern constructions of masculinity: Amussen, for instance, writes that “for early modern audiences, a man’s sexual activities were not central to his manhood” (“Christian Man,” 214), while Bray contends that “sexuality itself, whatever its object, makes a man effeminate” (159). See also Foyster, Manhood, 42–43. The male sexual boasts recorded by Foyster corroborate my argument here insofar as they tend to revolve around claims of being sexually irresistible and capable of satisfying inordinate feminine desire. Hodgkin notes that a “huddypick, or a hoddypeak, was a fool or simpleton, but it seems to have carried a particular suggestion of sexual simplicity (the related word ‘hoddypoll’ meant a cuckold)” (33). Hercules, a “figure of sexual folklore as well as myth,” reputedly lay with fifty women in one night. See Williams, 662–63. The most famous version of the Widow of Ephesus tale appears in Petronius’s Satyricon; various Medieval and later translations of the tale, both English and continental, are discussed by Arden, Vasvari, 263–65, Ure, and Runte.

Notes to pages 87–103

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11. Tharsalio, of course, plays on this assumption to tease Cynthia and to goad Lysander into suspicion (Bliss, 173). See, for example, 1.1.103–14, and 2.1.9–25. 12. Juneja cites them to make the point that Lysander must learn to accept “the contradiction of Cynthia being both true and human” (“Widowhood,” 169). 13. Schoenbaum, Williamson, Tricomi, and Corballis do not mention that Cynthia’s style of mourning is unusual, nor discuss her motive for it; Weidner assumes that when Cynthia follows Lysander to the tomb, she is simply “fulfilling her vow of fidelity to her husband” (523). Juneja claims that Cynthia’s decision is “molded by societal expectation” (“Widowhood,” 169); Bliss argues that Tharsalio’s “test” imposes “impossible choices” that require Cynthia’s suicide to prove her sincerity, but does not account for the fact that it is Cynthia, not Tharsalio, who introduces the possibility of death into the situation (177). 14. Although Cynthia and the soldier do not have sexual relations during his first visit to the tomb (Lysander says she would have given “the utmost earnest of her love” had not his “shame withstood” [5.2.40–41]), they apparently do so later, for Tharsalio challenges her to deny that she “plight[ed] indeed with him the utmost pledge of nuptial love” (5.3.159) and she does not. As a promise of future spousals (which 5.2.10–12 suggests has been made), plus sexual consummation, constitutes a legally binding if irregular marriage, Cynthia likely sees herself as married to the soldier. 15. Two minor subpots may be added to this list: Tucca’s courtship of Widow Miniver in Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601), and Clarence’s courtship of Eugenia in Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap (1602). Accosting her with a barrage of sexual promises and sexual insults, Tucca simultaneously stirs Miniver’s desires and deflates her social pretensions, winning her away from three richer and more genteel rivals, including the tellingly named Sir Quintillian Shorthose. In Sir Giles Goosecap’s subplot, inspired by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (Parrott, 894), Clarence, a timid philosopher, is aided in his wooing by Eugenia’s earthy, cynical Uncle Momford; despite Eugenia’s intellectual veneer and her aversion to the idea of marrying a poor man, Momford manages to win his niece for his friend by striking “while the steel / Of her affection is made soft and hot” (3.2.95–96). 16. Bould actually enters the play in disguise, but there are numerous clues up until he reveals his true identity that “Mary Princox” is in fact a man: Princox first appears with Bould’s friend, Well-tried, prompting Lady Bright to observe how strange it is for Bould and Well-tried to be asunder (1.1.228–29); both Feesimple and Well-tried are thrown into confusion when Lady Bright asks them the “woman’s” name (1.1.304–06); it is pointedly noted how old and ugly “she” is (1.1.334–39); “she” fumbles awkwardly when she has to pin her mistress’s ruff (2.4.44–48), and Lady Bright even remarks outright once, “me thinkes thou doest not do things like a woman” (3.3.47–48). Of course, the obviousness of Bould’s disguise would depend much on how it was staged. Peery’s introduction to the play notes that it was likely performed at different times by both a boys’ company (the Queen’s Revels Children) and two

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17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Notes to pages 104–16 adult companies (the Prince’s Men and Lady Elizabeth’s Men) (144–45). When performed by the adult companies, the role of Bould could have been taken by an adult actor, distinguishing the elderly (and suspect) Princox from the play’s “women” played by youths. Leggatt claims that Bould “cuts a shabby and even ridiculous figure” in the scene of attempted seduction, and is comically deflated by the widow’s successful defense of her chastity (Citizen Comedy, 112). While the joke is indeed on Bould in this scene, the widow’s avowed love and desire for him make him more an object of amused sympathy than of ridicule and save him from truly losing face the way he would with an outright rejection. What he does lose, he makes up as a successful trickster at the end. Marston’s Isabella in fact remarries, but runs off with another man the day after her wedding; her humiliated husband is driven to relinquish his wealth and join a monastery. The PRO reference for the records is STAC 8/31/16; they are remarkably legible and well-preserved. The articles are presented as two parts of a single study; the first is printed in the June issue of The Library, and the second in the September issue. Both are reprinted together in a volume issued by Oxford University Press. I will refer to them parenthetically by part and page number: e.g., 1:43 for page 43 of the June article. In the Bill of Information, the ballad is not divided into lines or stanzas; I have used Sisson’s lineation and punctuation (2:238–40). Prosecution Bill of Information. Sisson, 2:256. Deposition of Holiday. Defence Bill of Information. Three times according to the Deposition of John Davies; Garfield’s Deposition says three or four. Prosecution Bill of Information. Deposition of Snow. Deposition of Garfield. Prosecution Bill of Information. Deposition of Jackson. Deposition of Snow. Deposition of Garfield. Deposition of Snow. Deposition of Garfield. Prosecution Bill of Information. Ibid. Deposition of John Audley. Deposition of Holiday. Defence Bill of Information. Ibid. Ibid.

Notes to pages 116–21 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

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Defendants’ Interrogatories, no. 15. Defendants’ Interrogatories, no. 2; Deposition of Holiday. Defence Bill of Information. The visit of the churchwardens is a fascinating but elusive detail. In the defendants’ Bill of Information, Hopkins corroborates Wise’s account of the visit: he claims that Audley summoned him to the Nag’s Head, where he found the churchwardens, “whoe semeing to question them, this defend[an]t did give his worde for theire foarthcominge in case it shoulde bee required.” This is the last we hear of these officials, for they are not mentioned in the interrogatories nor in the depositions. Perhaps the incident is entirely fabricated, and dropped out of the case when the relevant churchwardens denied it. But even if the visit took place as Wise and Hopkins describe, it is hard to know what evidence it provides: while it would seem to give Anne an opportunity to report the conspirators for kidnapping and rape – if kidnapping and rape it was – it is also quite possible that she might be frightened or ashamed enough to go along with Audley’s story, reluctant to add a fornication charge to the difficulties she was already in. Defence Bill of Information. As Sisson observes, “[t]here is, as a fact, no indication of their complicity, which is alleged by the prosecution only in order to involve Dekker and the other theatre people in a conspiracy, and so to bring them under the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber. They are accused, in short, of a conspiracy to libel Anne Elsdon” (2:234). Garfield had in fact first attempted to prosecute Audley and the others under Common Law, which resulted only in a series of acquittals; hence the charges of conspiracy, which allowed him to take the matter to the Star Chamber. For the details of the Common Law proceedings, see Sisson 1:51–54. Deposition of Garfield. Prosecution Bill of Information. Deposition of Garfield. The word “collour” is used in this sense elsewhere in the prosecution’s Bill of Information, in reference to Audley and his confederates “being thus ryotouslye and unlawfullye under p[re]tence and Collour of the said p[re]tended marryage possessed of all her whole estate.” The pamphlet, by one “Oliver Oatmeal,” is reprinted in Grosart; the case of Mrs. Mescall is discussed by Harrison and by Forker. Forker further notes the parallels between the Mescall case, Wit Without Money, and Keep the Widow Waking. Defendants’ Interrogatories, no. 24. Deposition of Hopkins. Defendants’ Interrogatories, no. 18. Williams cites a contemporary association between “apricock” and “penis” in Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (1.4.53): Middleton contrasts “plebian fruitfulness with the sparser produce of ‘paling physicking gentlefolks . . . , and hardly then a whole one as it should be; the wanting of

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Notes to pages 133–40 some apricock or something loses a member on him, or quite spoils it’” (31). 4 T H E H U S B A N D ’S F E A R

1. I am following Brooks in assigning the first three lines of this speech to Castiza; older editions print them as a continuation of the Captain’s preceeding remark, “Go make a widower, hang thyself!” (1.2.73). As Brooks points out, Castiza, as the injured party, is far more likely to protest her husband’s lack of love, kindness, and respect than the Captain would be to speak of his marriage in such uncharacteristic terms. 2. The paradoxical power of the man who willfully enjoys and profits from his wife’s infidelity is further explored in my essay “‘A wittall cannot be a cookold’: Reading the Contented Cuckold in Early Modern English Drama and Culture.” 3. Eccles quotes a petition in which Harvey refers to himself as “‘Captayne Thomas Harvey . . . sometyme a servitor both by land and Sea’” (527). The correspondences between the real-life marriage and the play are most fully discussed by Brooks in “Middleton’s Stepfather” and in the introduction to his edition of The Phoenix, 118–24. Many critics are influenced by The Phoenix’s biographical parallels and morality-play elements to produce an overly-serious reading of the Captain’s villainy. See, for instance, Rowe, 31–32; Davidson, 127; Barker, 32. Brooks initially makes the assumption that the playwright’s real-life sympathies are easily integrated into a straightforward moral pattern: “If the Captain in The Phoenix was modeled after Middleton’s stepfather, then it seems reasonable to assume that Castiza, one of the few wholly admirable characters in Middleton’s plays, is the playwright’s tribute to the memory of his mother, who probably died shortly before he wrote The Phoenix, and Fidelio, the faithful son, is Middleton himself ” (“Stepfather,” 384). However, he amends this comment in the introduction to his edition of The Phoenix, dropping the claim that Castiza is “wholly admirable,” adding that “with his customary objectivity, Middleton does not portray the Captain’s wife as being above criticism” (124), and noting how Middleton “seems to want his audience to laugh at the Captain’s bawdy – and cruel – puns at his wife’s expense” (131). While many critics observe that the other malefactors of The Phoenix are humorously presented, only Brooks and Kistner and Kistner (“Early Developments,” 185) recognize the Captain as a similarly comic villain. 4. OED contain 14: “To refrain from expressing or yielding to feeling, passion, etc.; to restrain oneself; to refrain or keep from (obs.); spec. to be continent, to keep oneself in chastity (obs.). 5. Many of the play’s critics believe that Lovewit triumphs in the end, reading his triumph either as evidence of his society’s thorough moral corruption or as the comic vindication of wit and ironic detachment. For examples of the former argument, see Blissett, 333–34; Ross, 448; of the latter, Leonard, 68–69; Arnold, 161–62; Leggatt, Citizen Comedy, 76–77. Others, however, point out

Notes to pages 141–54

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

217

that Lovewit (to varying degrees) is gulled by Face, notably Dessen, Jonson’s, 130–31; Dutton, 122; Schuler, 201; Rebhorn, 355–56; Summers and Pebworth, 79; most of the latter group observe that Dame Pliant is not the prize she appears to be. See James, “Ben Jonson’s Way,” 28–29. Presumably the “good brain” is Face, to whom Lovewit earlier refers as “my brain” (5.5.7), but Lovewit could also simply be speaking of his own cleverness. Both Schuler (201) and Dutton (122) mention the absurdity of expecting anything but cuckoldry from a “young wife” and a “good brain”; the double entendres of the last line further support an ironic reading of the speech. Evidence for Middleton’s (probably sole) authorship of The Puritan, together with a summary of earlier attribution work on this play, is found in Lake, 109–35. The only subsequent challenge to Lake’s conclusion is from Dominik, who argues on the basis of stylistic evidence for the presence of Shakespeare as a minor collaborator. OED tug n. 7. Although the earliest extant copy of the Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele dates from 1607, the book was entered in the Stationers’ Register on December 14, 1605 (Lake, 110). Christian, “Middleton’s Acquaintance,” discusses several plot correspondences between the play and the jest-book, but does not comment on how jest structure may influence the play’s ending. For another example of the same kind of structure, see Twelve Mery Jests of the Wyddow Edyth. The Widow Edyth engages in a series of confidence games in which she pretends to be either rich and marriageable or rich and in need of help to bring in her debts. She fleeces her suitors and the men who try to “help” her for their own mercenary motives, and then flees before they can claim what they are after. The widow generally nets very little from each scam, and her “jests” seem as much designed to mock men who would take advantage of her as they are to make a financial profit. As Christian points out, this situation is adapted from “The Jests of George and the Barber,” where Peele employs a similar scheme to evade a barber from whom he has “borrowed” a lute (“Middleton’s Acquaintance,” 754). I am indebted to Paul Yachnin for this observation. The lascivious connotations of “Fitchow” are evident in King Lear 4.4.122–23 – “The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t / With a more riotous appetite” – and Othello 4.1.147, where Cassio calls Bianca “such another fitchew.” A fitchew is in fact a polecat, itself an early modern slang term for a whore, as young William’s Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor illustrates. Fitchow asks Tridewell to free Widgine from his marriage to Constance Holdup, and then to get “a Licence with [his] own name” so that she and he may go to church, “as soone as [he] will” (5.8.317); Tridewell replies “O that’s done already. What are you agreed?” (5.8.319), but as the latter remark is directed to Widgine, who has just purchased his freedom with a hundred-pound bribe to Hold-up, the former may refer solely to him as well. These are the last lines that Tridewell and Fitchow speak in the play.

218

Notes to pages 155–59

16. In his entry for “coming” (280), Williams includes a quotation from Burton that is interesting in this context: “Sometimes [women] lie open and are most tractable and coming, apt, yielding, and willing to embrace, to take a green gown . . .” (3.2.2.4); he glosses “lute” as a fairly common double-entendre for the female genital area, noting that “in Renaissance iconography the graceful swell of the instrument makes it suggestive of a woman’s belly” (834). 17. This passage is also uncharacteristic in that Whythorne borrows from a misogynist author – the fourteenth-century Frenchman Jehan Le F`evre – without acknowledging that he is doing so. (Compare his list of misogynist commonplaces and tales at 13–17, where even the ones without cited sources are carefully prefaced with “one said . . . another said . . .”.) The relevant lines from Le F`evre begin with a contemptuous reference to the foolishness of widows who experiment with make-up and hairstyles, and continue “One moment she is willing, the next she isn’t; now she’s friendly, now hostile; first she quarrels with one person then with another, praising one to the skies and piling scorn on another. And if ever out of habit many men waste their time with her, she is still too dissolute, abandoning the flower for the flames. In this way, she proves to be na¨ıve and foolish, resembling the dung-beetle, which leaves the perfume of the flowers to follow in the wake of carts, wallowing in horse shit. And just like the she-wolf on heat, that always takes the worst male as her mate, so the widow always chooses badly” (Blamires, Woman Defamed, 187–88). It would seem that in this instance, authority resonated so closely with experience that Whythorne chose to adopt Le F`evre’s analogy as his own; but one is then left to ponder the extent to which familiarity with this passage may have actually shaped Whythorne’s perception of and narrative of his courtship.

5 A P L A Y W R I G H T ’S R E S P O N S E 1. They are The Phoenix, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, More Dissemblers Besides Women, The Widow, and Women Beware Women. Lake appends The Widow to his list of twelve canonical plays as “only barely a doubtful case, since it is accepted by nearly all students of Middleton today as a work of his sole authorship” (1). 2. The exceptions are Your Five Gallants, A Mad World, My Masters, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. 3. For Middleton’s unorthodox handling of theatrical convention, see also Ewbank, and especially Rowe. Rowe, in my opinion, generally attaches too much moral weight to the playwright’s undercutting of comic conventions, but his book assembles much evidence of such undercutting itself . 4. Paster, “Introduction,” 27–34 provides an excellent discussion of the relationship between Blastfield and Easy, which she read as “a strong critique of the code of friendship and its centrality to gentlemanly self-esteem” (33). 5. Although Quomodo does later begin to preen himself on Thomasine’s apparent grief as a “widow,” and is understandably outraged by her marriage to his victim,

Notes to pages 160–69

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

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4.1.81–116 makes it clear that observing her reaction is only an afterthought in his decision to fake his death. Numerous critics have remarked on this pattern. See, for instance, Kistner and Kistner, “Heirs,” 68–69; Chatterji, 350–51; Gibbons, 129; and especially Rowe, 61–72, who sees the play as specifically following the Prodigal Son paradigm. Kistner and Kistner, who describe Thomasine’s function as the play’s “good angel,” try to whitewash her obvious sexual appetite in order to make her virtue accord with what the role ordinarily demands (“Heirs,” 69); however, as Paster points out, “Thomasine Quomodo repeatedly voices dissatisfaction – both consciously and not – with her husband’s sexual performance” (“Introduction,” 46). In focusing on the construction and courting of “Widow Medler,” I am avoiding what to this point has been the main critical debate about A Trick, concerning the extent to which the play condemns the property-obsessed society it depicts. This debate tends to ignore the widow-hunt (except, in a general sense, as the pursuit of wealth), considering instead whether the three scenes featuring the drunken usurer Dampit are designed to deflect moral condemnation from the lesser sins of Witgood, Lucre, and Hoard, or conversely, to remind the audience of the warped values inherent in the seemingly amoral fun of the main plot. The first view is held by Levin, who argues that Dampit exists in the play to “draw off to himself the audience’s detestation of usury, and its apprehensions,” leaving them “freer to regard Lucre and Hoard simply as ridiculous butts who represent no moral threat and so can be let off at the end with relatively mild comic discomfitures” (132). See also Covatta, City Comedies, 102–03, who agrees with Levin but adds that the play’s moralizing is not confined to the Dampit scenes. A related view is found in Parker, 188 and Leggatt, Citizen Comedy, 58, who see Dampit as a safety-valve for the playwright’s own disgust. For the argument that Dampit is but a part of the play’s pervasive moral disorder on which Middleton passes judgement, see Rowe, 80–91 and Mount, 260. See Williams’s citations for “medlar” (871–72) and “staff” (1300–01); one also suspects that the widow is not a “Country Gentlewoman” purely for the sake of her lands. Williams glosses “perform” as “copulate” (1012); the euphemism is commonplace. There is a specific bawdy innuendo on “uncle’s house” in these lines; an “aunt” is a prostitute or, more likely, a bawd, and as Williams points out, there is a play on Witgood’s uncle’s house “as if it is that of an aunt” (48). As Jinny gives Sam the gold chain and diamond with the instructions to “at thy best opportunity fasten ’em both upon her” (2.1.356–57), the jewelry may be intended more to seal a hasty or fraudulent contract between Sam and the Widow, by forcing her to accept tokens of betrothal, than to impress her with riches. Paster points out that A Trick is thickly populated by “nameless people we hear about but never see,” including the widow-hunters of 3.1.253–58 and the

220

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Notes to pages 176–91

widows whom Lucre imagines at 2.1.318–21, a technique which has the effect of implying “that what Middleton dramatizes has been selected almost at random from an urban abundance of comic material” (Image of the City, 170). The text indicates Lambston’s wealth when Lady Goldenfleece, having discovered his plans to betray her, exclaims, “for thy sake / I’ll never covet titles and more riches, / To fall into a gulf of hate and laughter” (2.1.376–78); he himself merely wants the widow to increase what he already has, to “strengthen my estate and make me able / To set off all thy [Kate’s] kisses with rewards” (1.2.129–30). In performance, the relative wealth and status of the suitors would readily be conveyed by costume. Rowe assumes throughout his reading of No Wit that Weatherwise is an old man (see, for instance 119–20), but I find nothing in the play to indicate his age. Heinemann, more pertinently, refers to him as a member of the “semibankrupt gentry” (100). Weatherwise’s poverty is indicated at 2.1.126–131. Jacobs describes Kate’s bawdy wooing of Lady Goldenfleece as a “parody” of the typical suitor’s promises to satisfy and impregnate a widow, but claims that “the assumptions underneath [i.e., that this is what widows want] are never undermined” (151). For a discussion of the match’s homoerotic undertones, see DiGangi, 94–95. Leinwand observes “something poignant about the widow’s desire to fill her bed,” ascribing it to Middleton’s “uncertain treatment” of the character as he “struggl[es] with the stereotype of the sex-craved widow” (184–86). Other critics who write on The Widow evade the issue of Valeria’s choice altogether: in perhaps the longest sustained analysis of the play, Friedenreich confines himself to plot summary and analysis of Middleton’s language (4–13); Barker focuses exclusively on the subplot (88); Chakravorty dismisses The Widow in just over eleven lines, claiming that “psychological and moral readings make heavy weather of the token motives and reformations” (117). The allusions are listed in Taylor’s notes to The Widow at 1.2.14; 1.2.95; 1.2.103; 1.2.111; 1.2.149; 1.2.153. It is difficult to tell from these lines whether Valeria has told the Second Suitor that “she knows not . . . a kind respect,” or whether this is Ricardo’s wishful interpretation of her stated willingness to allow her suitors “liberty to come and go.” However, even if Valeria has declared herself to be fortune’s “gift,” she may be merely doing what she describes at 2.1.25–27: telling her suitors what they want to hear. While Valeria’s lines, “Heaven send me one that loves me, and I’m happy! / Of whom I’ll make great trial ere I have him” (2.1.21–22) might conceivably be understood to motivate her actions throughout the rest of the plot, it is hardly possible that an audience would perceive her resistance to Ricardo as an extended test. In fact, all opportunity – even all necessity – for testing Ricardo effectively vanishes when he springs his trap. Not only does Valeria rightly conclude then that Ricardo does not love her for herself – “Am I betray’d to this, then? then I see / ’Tis for my wealth: a woman’s wealth’s her traitor” (2.1.78–79) – but she is now forced to play by his rules, defending herself in

Notes to pages 192–201

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

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court rather than administering any “great trial” of her own. Valeria’s attempts, midway through the lawsuit, to settle out of court by paying Ricardo “a thousand dollars” (4.1.97) or by giving him the well-dowered Violetta as a bride, are thus most logically seen as motivated by an honest desire to get rid of him and to put an end to a suit that might well conclude by forcing the marriage upon her. Only after Valeria wins the lawsuit does she begin any test of her suitors’ mercenariness, which she performs by conveying her property in trust to her brother Brandino. Oakes makes the same point about Ricardo’s construction of Valeria, observing that “the male perceives desire where restraint prevails. Playwrights seem to have been acutely aware of this peculiar sort of projection. In fact, the impecunious man’s lustification of the rich widow is the fulcrum on which Middleton’s The Widow rests” (258). “‘Forma Pauperis’ is a legal term meaning ‘in the state of a pauper,’ where pauper is defined as ‘one allowed, on account of poverty, to sue or defend in a court of law without paying costs.’ (See OED, ‘pauper,’ entry 1a)” (Levine, “Middleton’s The Widow,” 19). The erotic implications of the Second Suitor’s endearments are further suggested when he states “I have no other venery but vexation, / That’s all my honey now” (4.1.30). For example, when he claims to love the widow “not for her wealth but for her person too” (1.2.161), he is responding to Francisco’s reluctance to participate in the trap unless Ricardo loves Valeria (Oakes, 261); he also proclaims his love in an attempt to soothe Valeria’s anger after she realizes she is trapped (2.1.87, 104). Elsewhere, any non-mercenary inclination he shows toward Valeria is a mixture of crude sexual appetite (4.1.118–9) and a determination to pursue his course in the face of the widow’s opposition (2.2.54–6). This is the ambiguous admission of love to which I referred earlier. Does Valeria mean that her love for Ricardo makes her his, or that she will be his “faithfully” to the extent that his love – if he continues to prove it – makes her so? See Jacobs, 148–49 for an insightful discussion of the erotic and economic implications of the stage widow’s childlessness.

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Whittle, Jane. “Inheritance, Marriage, Widowhood, and Remarriage: a Comparative Perspective on Women and Landholding in North-East Norfolk, 1440– 1580.” Continuity and Change 13 (1998): 33–72. Whythorne, Thomas. The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne. Modern Spelling Edition. Ed. James M. Osborn. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Williams, Gordon. A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. 3 vols. London: Athlone, 1994. Williamson, Marilyn L. “Matter of More Mirth.” Renaissance Papers no vol. (1956): 34–41. Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Wright, Sue. “‘Churmaids, Huswyfes and Hucksters’: The Employment of Women in Tudor and Stuart Salisbury.” Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England. Eds. Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin. London: Croom Helm, 1985. 100–21. Wrigley, E. A., et al. English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580– 1837. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Zimmerman, Susan. “Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy.” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992. 39–63.

Index

Adamson, N. 204n.6, 205n.10 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius Commendation of Matrimony, The 23–24 Ambrose, Saint 18, 206n.12 Amussen, Susan 51, 209n.2, 212n.6 Ancient True and Admirable History of Patient Grisel, The 60 Androtius, Fulvius Widdowe’s Glasse, The 18 apprentices, marriage of 205n.8 Archer, Rowena 20 Arden, Heather 202n.4, 212n.10 Aristophanes Ecclesiazusae, The 203n.4 Arnold, Judd 216n.5 Audley, John 114, 115 Audley, Tobias 111–23 B., Ste. 211n.25 Bachelor’s Banquet, The 54, 127 ballads, broadside “Anything for a quiet life” 51 “Bachelor’s Resolution, A” 46 “Cunning Age, The” 69 “Hee-Divell, A” 209n.4 “I tell you, John Jarret, you’l breake” 209n.4 “Keeping the Widow Wakeing” 109–10, 118, 119 “Lamentation of a new married man, The” 49 “Merry new Song of a rich Widdowes Wooing, A” 69 “Nobody his Counsaile to Chuse a Wife” 129–30, 140, 169 “Old Bride, or the Gilded Beauty, The” 34 “Proverb old, Yet ne’er Forgot, A” 45, 77, 128 Barker, Richard 216n.3, 220n.19 Barron, Caroline 39, 205n.7, 206n.14 Barry, Lording 5 Ram Alley 11, 90, 158; compared to The Widow 185, 196; compared to Greene’s Tu

Quoque 99; aggressive courtship in 95, 97–99, 197, 199, 200 ; widow’s sexual appetite in 96–97, 122 Batho, G. R. 47 Batty, Bartholomew Christian Man’s Closet, The 46, 47, 58 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher 5, 157 Scornful Lady, The 48, 56–57, 199 Beck, Irvin 55, 210n.11 Becon, Thomas Catechism 33, 34, 45 Belsey, Catherine 4 Bennett, Elizabeth 1, 2, 199, 201 Bensel-Meyers, Linda 203n.8 Benson, Mary 71 Berman, Alan 99–102 Bernard, Richard Ruth’s Recompense 33, 34 Bettey, J. H. 205n.9 Blamires, Alcuin 202n.4, 218n.17 Bliss, Lee 212n.3, 213n.11, 213n.13 Blissett, William 216n.5 Boulton, Jeremy 4, 15, 204n.1, 204n.6 Bradbrook, Muriel 157 Brathwait, Richard English Gentlewoman, The 36, 208n.26 Good Wife, The 62 Bray, Alan 212n.6 Breitenberg, Mark 54–55, 212n.5 Brodsky, Vivian see Elliott, Vivian Brodsky Brome, Richard 5 Northern Lasse, The 151–54, 199 Bronfman, Judith 210n.13, 210n.15 Brooks, John 216n.1, 216n.3 Brustein, Robert 8 Bruster, Douglas 10 Burnley, J. D. 207n.20 Burton, Robert Anatomy of Melancholy, The 29, 81, 218n.16

237

238

Index

Cabei, Cesare Ornamenti della Gentildonna Vedova 18, 19 Cahn, Susan 209n.6, 209n.7 Calvi, Giulia 206n.16 Capel, Richard Tentations: Their Nature, Danger, Cure 38 Carleton, Samuel 203n.4 Carlile, Elizabeth 71–72 Carlile, Henry 71–72, 199 Carlton, Charles 8, 203n.5, 204n.2 Cartmell, Nicholas 111, 113, 115, 116 Catherine of Aragon 28 Chakravorty, Swapan 162, 220n.19 Chamberlain, Stephanie 203n.8 Chapman, George 5 Widow’s Tears, The ; aggressive courtship in 9, 95, 197; attitudes to remarriage in 11, 77–78, 105, 158; compared to The Widow 184, 185; suitor’s anxiety in 79, 80–81, 90, 124, 173, 175, 177, 199; vows of widowed chastity in 78–79, 86–89; and “Widow of Ephesus” tale 3 ; widow’s sexual appetite in 79–81, 84, 85–86, 88, 122, 127, 179 charivari 22–23, 134 Chatterji, Ruby 219n.6 Chaucer, Geoffrey Troilus and Criseyde 213n.15 Chaytor, Miranda 7, 23, 206n.18 Cheatham, George 209n.36 Cherry, Caroline 203n.8 children see widows, children of Christian, Mildred 66, 211n.19, 217n.10, 217n.12 Chrysostom, Saint John 18, 206n.12 Cioni, Maria 210n.16 Clapham, D. 23 Clark, Alice 16, 51, 209n.6 Clark, Elaine 39, 205n.7 Cleaver, Robert Godly Forme of Household Government, A 50, 51 Cleter, Alice see Millington, Alice Cleter, Edward 70–71, 199 comedy 10, 26, 55–57, 207n.23 see also individual plays Comensoli, Viviana 210n.13 Cook, Ann Jennalie 204n.4, 209n.1 Cooke, J. 5 Greene’s Tu Quoque 11, 90; aggressive courtship in 9, 95, 99–102, 122, 197, 199, 200; compared to The Widow 185, 196; widow’s sexual appetite in 124, 179

Corballis, Richard 211n.2, 213n.13 Corbier, Mireille 202n.4 Coryat, Thomas Coryat’s Crudities 28 Court of Good Counsell, The 208n.35, 210n.10 courtship of maidens 42, 44–45 of widows, see The Passionate Morrice, individual plays Covatta, Anthony 158, 159, 219n.8 Crawford, Patricia 7, 37, 204n.3 Cressy, David 209n.3 cuckoldry 127, 141, see also Middleton, Thomas, The Phoenix; Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist Davidson, Clifford 216n.3 Davis, Natalie Zemon 23 Day, Angel English Secretary, The 35–36, 143 Deane, Janevive 66 Dekker, Thomas 5 Satiromastix 107, 213n.15 Sir Giles Goosecap 213n.15 Dekker, Thomas, John Webster, William Rowley, and John Ford 118 Keep the Widow Waking 11, 107–09, 124; lawsuit concerning 111–19; sexualization of widow in 119–22, 200 ; see also ballads, broadside, “Keeping the Widow Wakeing” Dekker, Thomas, Henry Chettle and William Haughton Patient Grissil 57–61, 79 Deloney, Thomas Jack of Newbury 124, 141; husband’s authority in 11, 48, 130–32, 199; suitor’s anxiety in 125–27 ; widow’s jealousy in 128 Dessen, Alan 137, 211n.20, 217n.5 Devereux, Margaret 135, 209n.7 DiGangi, Mario 220n.17 Discourse of the Married and Single Life, A 75 Dominik, Mark 142, 217n.8 Durham, Willyam 115 Dutton, Richard 141, 142, 217n.5, 217n.7 Eccles, Mark 66, 211n.19, 216n.3 Eliot, John 209n.1 Elliott, Vivian Brodsky 4, 14–15, 16, 17, 39, 45, 47, 204n.2, 204n.5, 208n.35 Elsdon, Anne 111–23, 201 Elsdon, John 111 Ephesus, Widow of 2–3, 86, 89 Erasmus, Desiderius De Vidua Christiana 6, 18 Erickson, Amy 4, 15–16, 39, 65, 66, 204n.1, 206n.17, 208n.35, 209n.6

Index Erler, Mary 22 Eure, William 135 Evans, Richard 208n.31 Everyman 161 Ewbank, Inga Stina 218n.3 fantasy, theatre as purveyor of 10, 44, 84–86 see also individual plays Fanshawe, Henry 38 Farmer, John 71 Farmer, Margaret 71 Farr Dorothy 161 Field, Nathan 5 Amends for Ladies 11, 90; aggressive courtship in 3, 95, 197; compared to The Widow 185; widow’s sexual appetite in 102–04, 179 Woman is a Weathercock, A 102 Finch, Heneage 2 Fissell, Mary 208n.26 Fletcher, Anthony 81, 209n.6 Fletcher, John 5 Captain, The 105–07 Wit Without Money 11, 90, 95, 158; compared to The Widow 196; masculinity in 90–91, 97, 200; widow as threat in 92–93, 124, 199 ; widow’s sexual appetite in 93–95, 120, 122, 124 Fontanus, Nicholas Woman’s Doctor, The 1 Forker, Charles 215n.53 Foucault, Michel 203n.4 Foyster, Elizabeth 7, 47, 209n.3, 212n.7 Fraser, Antonia 6, 202n.1, 206n.18 Freidenreich, Kenneth 220n.19 Fuller, Thomas 118 Gare, Margery 72–75, 198, 199 Garfield, Benjamin 111–19 Garfield, Elizabeth 111, 113 Geller, Lila 6, 8, 25, 30, 38, 203n.8, 207n.25, 208n.28 Gibbons, Brian 219n.6 Giese, Loreen 211n.23 Glasse for Householders, A 210n.10 Gouge, William Of Domesticall Duties 23–25, 50, 54, 62–63, 186, 211n.25 Gowing, Laura 51, 72 Greaves, Richard 208n.28, 209n.1 Greenblatt, Stephen 10 Griffith, Matthew Bethel: Or a Forme For Families 50, 62, 211n.25

239

Grosart, Alexander 120 Gurr, Andrew 99 Hammer, Paul 46 Hammond, Gerald 38 Hanawalt, Barbara 20, 21, 22, 206n.15 Hanson, Elizabeth 203n.6 Harrison, G. B. 215n.53 Harvey, Thomas 65–66, 137, 157, 199 Hassel, R. Chris Jr. 207n.22 Haughton, William 5 Haukes, Thomas 39 Hazlitt, W. Carew 195 Heal, Felicity 134 Heale, William 208n.30 Herring, Thelma 212n.3 Heylyn, Peter Cosmographie 28, 29 Hide, Edward 117 Hoby, Margaret, see Devereux, Margaret Hoby, Thomas Posthumous 134–35 Hodgkin, Katharine 82–83 Hodgkins, Richard 118 Holiday, Francis 111, 112, 114, 116 Holland, Aaron 118 Holles, Gervase 143, 154 Holmes, David 183 Hopkins, Thomas 115, 117, 120 Horne, David 150 Houlbrooke, Ralph 18, 38, 39, 204n.1, 204n.3 Hoy, Cyrus 203n.7, 210n.13 Hunt, William 39 Ingram, Martin 23 Italy plays set in 25–33; see also Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi; and Middleton, Thomas, More Dissemblers Besides Women seclusion of women in 28–29 Jackson, Martha 111, 112–13, 115 Jacobs, Kathryn 196, 203n.8, 220n.16, 221n.28 James, Katherine 203n.8, 211n.22, 217n.6 Jankowski, Theodora 8, 204n.9 Jardine, Lisa 126, 203n.8 jealousy female 11, 125, 126–28, see also Deloney, Thomas, Jack of Newbury male 28–29 , see also cuckoldry Jerome, Saint 18, 206n.12 Jonson, Ben 5 Alchemist, The 26, 48, 138–41 Bartholomew Fair 67–69, 124, 142, 152 Juneja, Renu 8, 9, 184, 203n.5, 203n.8, 211n.20, 211n.22, 212n.3, 213n.12, 213n.13

240

Index

Kehler, Dorothea 6, 18, 19, 25, 37–38, 203n.8, 205n.11 Keyishian, Harry 210n.13 Klapisch-Zuber, Christine 21, 23, 26, 206n.16 King, Margaret 21 Kingston, John 143 Kistner, A. L. and M. K. Kistner 216n.3, 219n.6, 219n.7 Lacey, Robert 47 Lake, David 217n.8, 217n.10, 218n.1 Larking, Lambert 202n.1 Leech, Clifford 207n.22 Le F`evre, Jehan 3, 218n.17 Leggatt, Alexander 40, 125, 132, 142, 211n.20, 214n.17, 216n.5, 219n.8 Leinwand, Theodore 104, 142, 145, 172, 175, 203n.8, 220n.18 Le Leu, Gautier 3 Leonard, Nancy 216n.5 Lessius, Leonardus Treasure of Vowed Chastity, The 18, 211n.25 Levin, Richard 59, 209n.37, 210n.13, 219n.8 Levine, Robert 184, 187, 221n.24 Libro de Buen Amor 3 Lightman, Marjorie 202n.4 Lilly, William 48, 53, 199 Lloyd, Anne 37 Lloyd, Humphrey 37 MacDonald, Roger 203n.5, 203n.8, 204n.11 Macfarlane, Alan 204n.10, 206n.13, 206n.19, 208n.33, 209n.6 Mahler, Andreas 207n.21 Manningham, John 10 marriage see remarriage Marston, John Insatiate Countess, The 107 masculinity and financial responsibility 49–53 importance of marriage to 48–49 widows’ threat to 11, 48, 53–55 see also individual plays, widows as ungovernable wives, sexuality Massinger, Philip 5 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A 13, 40 Matchinske, Megan 209n.3 McElroy, John 158 McLuskie, Kathleen 210n.13 Mendelson, Sara 7, 37, 204n.3 Mescal, Mrs. 120 xii Mery Jests of the Wyddow Edyth 217n.11 Middleton, Anne 65–66, 137, 157, 198, 199

Middleton, Avis 65 Middleton, Thomas 5, 65, 137, 157, 201 Mad World, My Masters, A 29 Michaelmas Term 15, 158–61, 182, 184 More Dissemblers Besides Women 6, 22, 25–28, 29–33, 78 No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s 11, 158, 197; aggressive courtship in 176–78; character of Kate in 172–74; character of Lady Goldenfleece in 182; ending of 182; marital conflict in 179–82; parody of suitor in 171, 172, 175–76; widow’s sexual appetite in 179 Phoenix, The 11, 65, 141, 158, 182, 200; cuckoldry anxiety in 132–34, 135–36; and Middleton’s family 137; moral structure of 137, 138 Puritan, Or the Widow of Watling Street, The 157, 158, 173, 175, 200; critical response to 141–42; ending of 144, 149–51, 182; tricksters’ plot in 145–48; widow’s financial control in 144; widow’s sexual appetite in 145 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 157 Trick to Catch the Old One, A 11, 158, 173, 175, 196, 197; character of Dampit in 219n.8; and suitors’ fantasy 162–65, 168–71; widow as disguise in 161–62; widow/whore analogy in 162–67; widow’s sexual appetite in 162–65, 168 Widow, The 3, 11, 25, 157, 158, 197; aggressive courtship in 188–90; character of Ricardo in 185–86; character of Valeria in 191–92; critical reponse to 183–84; marital conflict in 194–95; suitor’s anxiety in 186–87, 199; undercutting of convention in 184–85, 189–91, 195–97; widow’s sexual appetite in 192–93 Women Beware Women 29, 85, 107 Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley Fair Quarrel, A 157 Mikesell, Margaret 25, 26, 27, 203n.8, 203n.9, 205n.11, 207n.23, 207n.24, 208n.28 Millington, Alice 70–71 Morcombe, John 18 Morley, Nicolas 71 Moryson, Fynes Itinerary 28 Moulsworth, Martha 36–37 Moulton, Ian Frederick 81, 200, 201 Mount, David 219n.8 Muir, Kenneth 26, 172, 175–76 Nashe, Thomas 82 Nedham, Catherine 143

Index

241

Newnham, John Newnham’s Nightcrowe 208n.35 Newstead, Christopher 208n.30 Niccholes, Alexander Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, A 9, 34–35, 47, 70, 130, 203n.9, 205n.11

Plutarch Dialogue on Love 203n.4 Pressye, Charles 66 Prior, Mary 17, 52 “prodigal son” plays 55 Purkiss, Diane 51, 91, 209n.8, 209n.9

Oakes, Elizabeth 203n.8, 208n.30, 212n.4, 221n.23, 221n.26 Ogilby, John Ephesian Matron, The 3 Office of Christian Parents, The 38, 87 Orgel, Stephen 81, 84 Orlin, Lena Cowen 209n.8 Ostovich, Helen 67, 69, 139, 211n.20 Overbury, Thomas Characters 9, 34, 38, 83, 203n.9, 205n.11

Rackin, Phyllis 81, 201 Raleigh, Walter 37–38, 65, 205n.11 Rappaport, Steve 17, 48, 50, 51, 204n.6, 205n.8, 205n.10 Raven, John 1, 2, 199 Rebhorn, Wayne 140, 217n.5 Relation of the Island of England, A 19–20 remarriage and age gap between spouses 14–15 approval of 10, 35–37, 40–41 and assumptions about property 71–75 Catholic teachings on 18–19 church blessing of 206n.20 disapproval of 5–7, 22–23, 34–35; see also French, Italian, and Spanish attitudes to dying husbands’ attitudes to 37–38, 39 economic incentives for 15–18; of widows 17–18; of men marrying widows 16–17, 41–45, 49 of elderly widows 33–34, 70 French attitudes to 19–20, 23–24 Italian attitudes to 19–20, 21–22, 23; English beliefs about 25–33 Italian views of English 19–20 and pre-marital settlements 39, 63–69, 73 pre-reformation English attitudes to 19–21 Protestant teachings on 23–25, 33 Spanish attitudes to 19–20, 28, see also Vives, Joannes Ludovicus, The Instruction of a Christian Woman speed of 15 statistics on 14–15 warnings against 11, 36, 47, 69 see also individual plays Richlin, Amy 202n.4 Rigaud, N. J. 203n.5, 203n.8 Rogers, Donna 202n.4 Rogers, Thomas 71 Rosenthal, Joel T. 20, 206n.14 Ross, Cheryl 216n.5 Rous, John 1, 202n.1 Rowe, George 207n.22, 216n.3, 218n.3, 219n.8, 220n.15 Rowley, William 5 New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed, A 40–41, 60–61, 79, 199 Runte, Hans 212n.10 Ruth (biblical figure) 33

Page, William “Widdowe Indeed, The” 7, 38 Parker, R. B. 219n.8 Parlament of Women, The 209n.5 Parrott, Thomas 211n.2, 213n.15 Partridge, Eric 130, 211n.21 Passionate Morrice, The 42–44, 45, 48, 61 courtship of maidens in 42 courtship of widows in 42–44 Paster, Gail 218n.4, 219n.7, 219n.13 Paul, Saint 18, 19, 33 Pearson, Lu Emily 204n.9, 204n.11 Pebworth, Ted-Larry 217n.5 Peele, George Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, The 144 Peery, William 213n.16 Pechter, Edward 210n.13 Penry, John 39 Percy, Christopher 72–75, 199 Percy, Dorothy see Perrot, Dorothy Percy, Henry 46–47, 65 Advice to his Son 46 Percy, Margery see Gare, Margery Perkins, William Christian Oeconomie 62, 63, 208n.29, 211n.25 Perrot, Dorothy 46–47, 65 Perrot, Thomas 46 Perry, Mary Elizabeth 207n.26 Peterson, Joyce 207n.22 Phialas, P. G. 65, 211n.19 Phillips, Doll 120 Piera, Montserrat 202n.4 Pithie Epistle and learned discourse, of the worthiness of honourable Wedlocke, A 35

242

Index

Sackvill, John 66 Salingar, Leo 55 Savage, Rafe 118 sexuality assumptions about widows’ 1–2, 3–4, 7–10, 26–27, 82–84 male 81–82, 124–25, 200–01 see also individual plays Schoenbaum, Samuel 207n.22, 211n.2, 213n.13 Schuler, Robert 217n.5, 217n.7 Shakespeare Apocrypha, The 141 Shakespeare, William 5 Hamlet 5 King Lear 217n.14 Measure for Measure 101 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 217n.14 Othello 29, 209n.8, 217n.14 Romeo and Juliet 81 Twelfth Night 10 The Taming of the Shrew 10, 210n.12 Shepherd, Simon 209n.6 Sisson, Charles 108, 121, 214n.21, 215n.48 Slater, Miriam 204n.10 Smith, Henry Preparative To Marriage, A 62 Smith, Thomas De Republica Anglorum 29, 49 Sneyd, Charlotte 20 Snow, John 111, 122 Sokol, B. J. and Mary Sokol 65, 211n.18 Sowernam, Ester Ester hath hang’d Haman 49 Spenser, Marie 111, 122 Stone, Lawrence 4 Stretton, Tim 7, 37, 64, 65, 204n.3, 210n.17 Strong, Roy 67 Summers, Claude 217n.5 Swaine, Cicely 15 Swetnam, Joseph Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, The 47, 51, 52–53, 91, 143, 209n.8 Swinburne, Henry Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts, A 64 Taylor, Gary 184, 220n.20 Taylor, John Juniper Lecture, A 48, 54, 83, 127, 142, 144 Divers Crabtree Lectures 52 Taylor, Robert 112 Terry, Margery 111, 112, 115, 122 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 206n.20

Thomas, Keith 206n.18, 209n.3 Thompson, E. P. 206n.18 Thompson, Janet 7, 23, 206n.18 Todd, Barbara 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 204n.1, 206n.19, 208n.34 Topsell, Edward Reward of Religion, The 33 Tosh, John 48 Treglyne, Widow 18 Tricomi, Albert 211n.2, 213n.13 Tuvil, Daniel Asylum Veneris 180 Underdown, D. E. 131, 206n.19 univira 202n.4 Unton, Dorothy 67 Ure, Peter 212n.10 Vasvari, Louise 202n.4, 212n.10 Vickery, Amanda 209n.6 Vives, Joannes Ludovicus Instruction of a Christian Woman, The 6, 8, 9, 13, 18, 19, 27–28, 36, 207n.24 vowesses 22 Wadsworth, Frank 6, 25, 203n.8 Walcot, Peter 202n.4 Warner, Lyndan 23, 47 Webster, John 34 Duchess of Malfi, The 5, 6, 9, 22, 25–28, 30, 40 Weidner, Henry 211n.2 West, William Symbolaeography 39 Whately, William Bride-bush, A 75, 211n.25 Care-cloth, A 50 Whittesley, Archbishop 206n.20 Whittle, Jane 20 Whythorne, Thomas 1–2, 11, 35, 37, 44–45, 82–83, 154–56, 209n.1 Wiggin, Thomas 17 widows children of 21–22, 38, 205n.7 in classical literature 3 and employment 17–18 and inheritance 16, 20–21, 22 as jealous wives, see jealousy, female as ungovernable wives 47–48, 52–53, 54, 57–61, 125, 126, 198 as abused wives 69–75 seclusion of 27–28 suicide of 208n.30 whose new husbands wish them dead 142–44 see also remarriage, sexuality, vowesses, individual plays

Index widowers 208n.35 Wife of Bath, the 2, 131 Willet, Andrew 208n.27 Williams, Gordon 212n.9, 215n.57, 218n.16, 219n.9, 219n.11 Williamson, Marilyn 203n.8, 213n.13 Wise, Francis 113, 117 wives, economic power of 62–63

Woodbridge, Linda 7, 203n.8, 204n.11 Wright, Sue 17 Wrigley, E. A. 204n.3 Yorkshire Tragedy, A 209n.8 Zeisel, William 202n.4 Zimmerman, Susan 173, 175

243