The gentleman's mistress by Tim Thornton Katharine Carlton

Author:Tim Thornton, Katharine Carlton [Tim Thornton, Katharine Carlton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Great Britain, Tudor & Elizabethan Era (1485-1603), Renaissance
ISBN: 9781526114099
Google: _XC5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-04-04T00:46:11+00:00

5

The ‘wronged’ partner

An honest man that had but one eie and a quean to his wife, entring vpon the sudden into his bed chamber by night, a knaue chanced to be then a bed with her, who hearing her husbands voice, shifted him suddenlie behind the doore, and thus she said vnto her Goodman: What husband, is't you euen welcome my good husband: I hope in God my dreame is come to passe: I was eue now adream'd that you could see with either of your eyes, in so much as I waked for joy, and I hope to find it true: And with that she arose from out her bed, & comming toward him: Good husband (she said) let me lay my finger on your seeing eie, and then tell me whether you discerne anie thing with the other: He answered: No, not anie thing. In this mean time she beckened to the Adulterer to be gone: who straight slipped from behind the doore downe the staires, and so scap'd quite away.1

In the late 1590s, Anthony Copley devoted a chapter to the description ‘of cuckolds’, depicting the unfortunate men as figures of fun. Despite the centrality of wifely adultery to the situation, cuckoldry has been identified as a transaction between men, particularly in Renaissance drama.2 Frequently depicted as wearing a pair of horns, the cuckold was judged by an act in which he did not participate, and the legitimacy and inheritance of his children might be brought into question. In contemporary terms, he was unable to control the sexual activity of his wife; however throughout Europe the idea developed that the adulterous wife transmitted the cuckold's horns from her lover to her husband.3 Mary Fissell has noted that ‘ballads about cuckolds dating from the 1620s and 1630s often place the blame for extra-marital sexual activity on the man's shoulders even when it is the wife who errs.’4 She also tracks the changing nature of interest in cuckold literature, increasing during the Restoration period, intensifying a crisis of paternity and transferring the blame for adultery onto the wife.5 Faramerz Dabhiowala has observed of the same period in the late seventeenth century how attributes such as wealth and social position could insulate against immorality, and he identifies the state of cuckoldry as being overpowered by the force of the man's status or rank.6 Certainly, gentlemen, esquires, knights and noblemen were rarely described as cuckolds in the evidence we have from the northern ecclesiastical courts. In one rare case the concept was addressed, but it was a gentleman who sued for the allegation of making, not of being made, a cuckold: John Vaisey, gentleman, sued Mary Shepherd for sexual slander claiming she had said to a number of witnesses, ‘Hang Thee Thomson for thou art a cuckold and a wittold too … for John Vessies went in and fucked thy wife.’7 There is no surviving evidence to suggest that Hugh Thomson tried to sue Shepherd either for the implication of his wife's adultery or for calling him a cuckold.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.