"No Assembly but horn-beasts": The Politics of Cuckoldry in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies

"NO ASSEMBLY BUT HORN-BEASTS" The Politics ofCuckoldry in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies Stephen Cohen In April 1567, in the midst ofone of the series of marital negotiations that punctuated the first halfofher reign, Elizabeth I witnessed the performance ofa now-unknown romantic comedy;when the playended, sheexpressedwhat Spanish ambassador Guzman de Silva reported as "her dislike ofthe woman's part"—the part, that is, that inevitably ended in marriage.1 Some thirty years later, when Shakespeare was writing his romantic comedies, the question ofthe queen's marriage was moot, and Elizabeth was presumably less sensitive to its potential dramatic figuration: though her oft-cited 1601 self-identification as Richard II indicates that she remained capable oftaking the drama personally, we have no extant record of her reaction to Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice, et al.2 Critical readings ofthe comedies' matrimonial conclusions have for the most part followed Elizabeth's lead, sayinglittle aboutthe queen's relation to the gender ideologies that inform the genre's conventional closure; those who have viewed the plays' marriages through the lens ofroyal iconography and gender politics have tended to see them less as veiled critiques ofthe unmarried queen than as comforting fantasies for the subjects ofan aging and popularmonarch.3 Nonetheless, there is in several oftheplays an insistent note ofanxietyabout the concluding marriages that belies the form's patriarchal fantasy and, I shall argue , cannot be fully explained without reference to Elizabeth's place in England 's marital imagination. That anxiety, however, is not associated with the plays' heroines about to relinquish their independence, but with theirheroes— and it finds its expression through the figure ofcuckoldry. THE JOURNAL FOR EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2004) © 2004 6 £ THE JOURNAL FOR EARLY MODERN CULTURAL STUDIES Cuckoldry has, of course, long been recognized as a common motif in Shakespearean drama, its prominence generallysubject to straightforward historical explanation. While the prevalence offemale marital infidelity in Elizabethan England is difficult to quantify, its cultural significance can hardly be overestimated.4 Cuckoldry represented a danger notjust to the sanctityofmarriage but, given the possibility of pregnancy, to the security of paternity and thus ofpatrilineal inheritance as well: a man could never be sure that his children and heirswere his own.5 Moreover, as a form ofcompetition between men in a patriarchal culture, cuckoldrywas a threat to social status and even masculinity : to be cuckolded by another man was to be emasculated or effeminized (Sedgwick ch. 3, Kahn). And finally, in a culture in which the status ofwomen was an increasingly contentious subject, the specter ofthe unfaithful wife was an affront to patriarchal social order itself, as suggested bycuckoldry's frequent association in the popular imagination with other forms offemale insubordination , including financial profligacy, sartorial ostentation, shrewishness and husband-beating.6 Given all this, it is hardly surprising to find Shakespearean plots in a variety ofgenres driven by the threat or fear ofcuckoldry (The Merry Wives ofWindsor, Othello, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline), and others exploring the catastrophic familial and social consequences ofinfidelity (Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida). As one might expect, in plays ofthese types cuckoldryis depicted as disrupting individual relationships by impugning particularwomen and demeaning particular men, creating potentially deadly enmities that must be purged either by explanation and forgiveness or byblood. Harder to explain in these terms, however, is the role played by cuckoldry in a series ofromantic comedies written in the last six or seven years of Elizabeth 's reign: TheMerchantofVenice (1596-7), MuchAdo aboutNothing( 15989 ), As You Like It (1599), and the generically problematic All's Well That Ends Well (1602-3). In these plays cuckoldry is presented less as a particular than a universal condition, an inevitable consequence of marriage itself. Its result is not enmity but fraternity, with cuckoldryserving as a badge ofhonor—albeit a heavily ironized one—marking membership in an exclusive realm ofmale solidarity that is at once a product ofand a counter to the genre's marital trajectory . Why does Shakespeare create this community ofcuckolds, and what is its relation to the complex cultural work ofromantic comedy? Critics who have approached these questions have tended to do so from one oftwo perspectives, the sociohistorical or the psychoanalytic, reading...