Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry in the Drama of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton

Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry in the Drama of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Gary Kuchar Many things that seem foul in the doing, do please, done. Jonson Psychoanalytic readings of early modern representations of cuckoldry generally consider the tendency of cuckolds (imaginary and real) to fantasize about their own cuckold scene as a strategy for coping with, or defending against, threats of emasculation. As Coppélia Kahn puts it in her influential study of masculinity in Shakespeare: to be betrayed by a woman [. ..] is to be humiliated or dishonored , and thus placed in a position of vulnerability that makes [the cuckold] psychologically like a castrated man, and thus womanish. To defend against the fear of such castration , men anticipate it in fantasy, and turn it against women by calling them whores. To be betrayed by a woman thus threatens a man's very masculinity—his identity as a man. (132) Kahn's thesis that the thought of being cuckolded serves a narcissistic defense against the fear of "psychosocial castration" convincingly applies to JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Winter 2001): 1-30. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 2 JNT Shakespearean characters such as Othello, Leontes and even Master Ford of The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, it remains inadequate for understanding the dynamics of cuckold anxiety as it is represented in Jacobean city comedy, particularly that of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. The difference here lies in the way that in Jacobean city comedy the representation of the cuckold figure anticipates the central principle of Lacanian psychoanalysis that narcissistically motivated defenses generally conceal an underlying and symptomatically derived pleasure directly opposed to the defense itself. Indeed, insofar as Jonson's and Middleton's representation of cuckold anxiety involves an either manifest or latent acknowledgement of the husband's active role in his own cuckolding,—be it real or only potential—he operates according to the structure of Lacanian perversion . He "gets off, [that is], on the staging of the very operation (castration ) that is supposed to require a loss of jouissance. He derives satisfaction from the enactment of the very operation which demands that he separate from the source of his satisfaction" (Fink 192-3). Rather than simply anticipating his social castration as a means for warding off its humiliating effects, the cuckold figure in Jacobean city comedy purposefully or "inadvertently" pursues his own social castration, secretly delighting in the thought of his own humiliation at the hands of another man. To this extent , Jonson and Middleton invite their audience members to read beyond the narcissistic defense as a means for grasping the cuckold's "disguised or systematically unrecognized/misrecognized pleasure" (Fink 214) at the very thought of his own social castration. The spectator of Jacobean city comedy is thus, as Katherine Maus observes, "obliged to evaluate symptoms , behavior the cause of which may be hidden or withheld" (576). As such, the use of double-entendre, dramatic irony, and other rhetorical and theatrical devices in Jonson and Middleton not only invite, but indeed compel, their audience members to interpret psychoanalytically. My principle challenge in what follows, then, is to demonstrate how the strange pleasures of emasculation which the acquiescent cuckold—or, more properly, wittol—derives from being cuckolded are encoded and to account for the distressing and/or alleviating significance that this encoding has for the way that Jacobean city comedy represents male anxieties regarding adultery and the integrity of early modern social relations more generally. What emerges from such an analysis is the recognition that the acquiescent cuckold or wittol functions in these plays as a social symp- Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry 3 torn, a literalized embodiment, as it were, of socio-ideological antagonisms . By stigmatizing the wittol to varying degrees, Jonson and Middleton construct highly ambivalent modes of closure that simultaneously provoke and assuage male anxiety over female sexuality. To this extent, Jacobean city comedies do not simply defend against the potential cuckold 's anxiety over his emasculation, but like dream-work, they articulate —while more or less obscuring—the socially transgressive pleasure derived from the thought and experience of emasculation itself. I conclude by suggesting that Middleton...