Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (review)

Jennifer M. Panek raises the interesting question of why early modern widows were generally characterized as "lusty," particularly in English comedies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Her instructive and entertaining book also aims "to explore the ideological work that this stereotype [of the lusty widow] performed for the men who constructed it" (4). Although this is not altogether new territory, Panek's careful critique brings together the plays that are her focus, documents such as conduct books and ballads, and earlier historical and literary scholarship to provide a discerning overview of the widow and her place in early modern English culture.

Panek argues that critics have overemphasized English opposition to widows remarrying. Although some writers were critical of remarrying widows, and of men who married widows, Panek, taking a "local and specific" approach (13), maintains that while Catholic authorities and Continental traditions discouraged widows from remarrying, Protestant authorities and English customs generally encouraged remarriage. Therefore, she suggests, the original audiences of such plays as The Duchess of Malfi and More Dissemblers Besides Women would have been culturally conditioned to sympathize with the widow-protagonists of those plays, seeing them as women constrained by foreign, Catholic customs.

Nevertheless, Panek points out that both the historical evidence and literature imply that men sometimes found that marrying widows threatened their identities and societal positions. A widow with property who married a younger, poorer husband was often said "to make a man," by endowing him with her property. However, such a woman might attempt to maintain control of her assets and seek to remind her husband of the source of their wealth, thus initiating an "emasculating exchange of gendered roles" (54). While widows of means were sought after, they were also a source of anxiety, since youths who sought to establish themselves as men of substance by marrying affluent widows could find themselves failing to gain either money or respect.

The myth of the lusty widow provides an antidote for male anxiety by depicting a youthful but virile theatrical hero who can win the widow's wealth by satisfying her sexual need. The widow's lust emphasizes female vulnerability, which is overcome by male power and control. In these plays, sex for the men is not a matter of passion or satisfaction; it is merely a means of obtaining property that a woman has gained through her husband's death. A widow's remarriage, therefore, restores the proper order of things by putting men in control of the money. While the widow's lust settles one problem, it raises another: if the widow is sexually insatiable, she may be unfaithful to her new husband. Consequently, the ideal solution for a young man, as depicted in various plays, is to retain the widow's wealth without retaining the widow.

Panek devotes her final chapter to analyzing four comedies by Thomas Middleton, who seems to have specialized in remarrying-widow plots. The explanation for this "near-obsessive preoccupation with widows" (157) may be biographical, since his mother remarried after his father's death and fought a fifteen-year battle with her new husband over the property she brought to their marriage. Middleton, however, inverts and parodies the tropes of the lusty widow stereotype: A Trick to Catch the Old One depicts a courtesan masquerading as a rich widow; in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, the successful suitor is a disguised woman; the title character of The Widow is not lusty; and in Michaelmas Term the young man's marriage to the "widow" is only temporary, since her first husband is only pretending to be dead. Middleton's burlesques of the conventional lusty-widow comedy frequently call into question the fantasy of the widow whose property can be acquired by a suitor's assertion of his masculinity.

This account of the myths surrounding widowhood and remarriage in the period's comedies offers valuable insights into the...