The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare

5. “Wooing, wedding, and repenting”: The Satisfactions of Marriage in Othello and Love’s Pilgrimage

Satisfaction, as we have charted over the course of the preceding chapters, is a qualitative as well as quantitative principle that organizes various categories of exchange: of transgression and redemption, of violation and vendetta, of debt and repayment. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, these categories converge in the famous “flesh bond,” which trammels up the characters’ financial as well as religious and emotional interdependencies. Those interdependencies share their syntax with an additional category of interpersonal exchange: marriage. Karen Newman, for instance, suggests that the intersection of the erotic and the economic in marriage grounds the play’s other relations. “The exchange of Portia from her father via the caskets to Bassanio is the ur-exchange upon which the ‘main’ bond plot is based,” she explains, offering a bracing reminder that the institution of marriage, given its role as a socioeconomic as well as affective and sexual transaction (nowhere made more explicit than in the commonplace of “rendering the marriage debt”), is implicated in the history of satisfaction.1 Chapter 5 “Wooing, wedding, and repenting” The Satisfactions of Marriage in Othello and Love’s Pilgrimage 120 Chapter 5 But the place of marriage in this history, I suggest, is not necessarily originary or paradigmatic, as Newman’s language of “ur” suggests. Rather, like the other activities, vocations, and desires we have been tracking, marriage’s place is determined by its conceptual and instrumental proximity to repentance . This proximity, as I discuss below, is observable in the shared status of marriage and penance as sacraments dismantled in the course of the Protestant Reformation. But it is more deeply enabled by the ways in which marriage served as an occasion as well as an object of repentance. Matrimony and marital satisfaction, this chapter suggests, were thus especially sensitive to the period’s reconfiguration of penitential “enough.” The Merchant of Venice, with its threats of cuckoldry and bawdy puns on intercourse, touches in a comic vein on the reparative as well as punitive resonances of marital satisfaction. It is Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, Othello, which dwells on them in tragic length and detail, forcing its protagonist to confront as sheer loss the transvaluation of satisfaction in the early modern period. As I explore in this chapter, Othello’s lament, “Would I were satisfied!” records a comprehensive sense that “enough” is no longer available in the realm of matrimonial love, where the sacred and secular (and specifically sexual) meanings of our term converge most intimately. This sense, I suggest, marks the climax of the early modern history of satisfaction, as the shock of the term’s theological reorientation reverberates in one of the most private spaces of shared human experience.2 The denouement of this history can be traced in the theatrical descendants of Othello, which had an exceptional afterlife in court revivals throughout the early Stuart period.3 Echoes of the play’s treatment of marriage and penitence sound across a range of Jacobean and Caroline “sex tragedies” that revel in the excesses and incompatibilities of female and male desire in relation to the bonds of marriage; they achieve maximum intensity in John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1633), a text that is so explicitly indebted to Shakespeare (although in this version the Desdemona and Cassio characters do fall in love) that Martin Butler suggests the characters “must have seen Othello.”4 But I focus here on a romance, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Love’s Pilgrimage (1613–1614), a close retelling of Cervantes’s “Las Dos Doncellas (The Two Damsels)” whose Spanish setting gives the dramatists nostalgic as well as parodic access to the possibility of penitential and erotic satisfaction. “Wooing, wedding, and repenting” 121 “Increase and multiply” The vicissitudes of satisfaction structure early modern accounts of marriage as a sexual, emotional, and communal bond.5 Wedlock’s specifically erotic component—sexual gratification or “due benevolence”—was itself called satisfaction and was subject to its vocabularies of enough and more.6 Thus the literature of marital advice and commentary, having accepted the Pauline admission in Corinthians that it is “better to marry than to burn,” endorses and even celebrates sexual activity as the “well-spring of marital plenitude, the primary means by which two become one”—as long as it remains rooted in a principle of restraint and self-control.7 William Perkins warns in a familiar formulation that “[the] performance of special benevolence one to another...