Introduction
The essay explores the conflicting temporal logics of marriage and desire in early modern medical, theological, and literary discourses: from Robert Burton’s encyclopedic The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)1 to Protestant marriage sermons and select plays. Its main interest lies in how early modern discourses inscribe a fault line into marriage, constituted by the disruptive and transitory nature of erotic love.
The concept of desire that features in this essay’s title draws on the early modern notion of “Heroicall Love” (amor hereos), a form of erotic desire or “burning lust”, as Burton put it,2 that is associated with “a pathological version of love”.3 Often “translated as ‘love-sickness’”,4 this excessive, pathological love hints at the transgressive force of desire. It attaches all too easily to inappropriate love objects and disregards the bounds of “conjugall love”.5 Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy offers access to an encyclopedic array of classical and medieval sources. Although his discourse on love-melancholy includes references to Platonic and Neoplatonic conceptions of transcendent love, its main interest is in the somatic and psychological symptoms of desire, in psycho-physiological causes, consequences, and cures.6 For this essay on desire in married life, the psycho-physical aspects of love are of greater interest than its transcendence, which, in Platonic and Neoplatonic discourses, was largely tied to a homoerotic male context.7
In the post-Reformation culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, marriage was a popular topic, featuring in sermons, pamphlets, and theological tracts which popularized the idea of marriage as partnership, i.e. as “companionate marriage”.8 Protestant and Puritan writings in particular describe man and wife as partners who are bound together by mutual affection and who occupy complementary positions in a patriarchal structure of domestic government and management. Protestant sermons approach desire with suspicion, but they also assign sexuality a rightful place in the marriage bed. After all, “Nuptiall love” ensures procreation.9 It also protects against “whoredome”.10 The discursive efforts of Protestant and Puritan writers cannot, however, dispel the tension between desire as an incalculable and excessive force that causes “much mischiefe” and marriage as a calculated, socially controlled process with rational economic aims (such as wealth and lineage).11 Integrating an incalculable passion into the economic calculus of how to maintain a household and increase wealth results in a precarious enterprise, as numerous early modern plots of cuckoldry in the London theatres demonstrate.
Early modern works on love often picture desire as a sudden event. Exemplified by Cupid’s arrow, the emphasis on the instantaneity of love goes hand in hand with the fear that whatever happens quickly can just as quickly change, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Desire can diminish over time or find a new object. Especially in periods of “idleness”, longing for an absent love-object can also increase. In his treatise, Burton identified “Idleness” explicitly as one of the many causes of “Heroicall Love”.12 His final piece of advice, offered at the very end of his long treatise, identifies idleness as a particularly virulent cause of pathological love: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”13 Puritan preacher and clergyman William Whately quotes Ovid to highlight the risks of an idle life: “Take idlenesse away, saith he, and lust will have no dart to wound withall.”14 Not only is desire unstable in time and increases in periods of “empty” time, desire also renders time itself unstable, as Burton’s description of the unhappy lover suggests: “And when he is gone, he thinkes every minute an houre, every houre as long as a day, ten daies a whole yeare, till he see her againe.”15 In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet famously feels that it is “twenty years” (2.2.169) until she’ll hear from Romeo, although it is really but “tomorrow” (2.2.167).16 Desire thus tampers with time, lengthening and shortening hours, and is itself manipulated by intervals of idleness. In its changeability and instantaneity, desire conflicts with the temporal economy of marriage. Desire is sudden and forceful in the beginning, but burns out easily; marriage, in contrast, is a regulated and lengthy process, preceded by a contract and ending (ideally) only with death. In social terms, too, desire and marriage appear to belong to different social orders: If the affections of husband and wife are meant to be constant, well-tempered, regular, and reciprocal, desire is excessive, disruptive, inconstant, and all too often one-sided. Its force escapes social control and threatens the economic rationality of the household.
I begin my investigation with a brief discussion of the representation of love in Burton’s copious compilation of medical, philosophical, and poetical sources. Romeo and Juliet will help to exemplify the suddenness of love that Burton postulates. My exploration then turns from love as a sudden event to some examples of discursive attempts to reconcile the temporalities of love and marriage in the practical advice literature of the time.17 The essay discusses how the anonymously published domestic tragedy The Arden of Faversham performs the failed integration of love and marriage and examines Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as a play that stages the reconciliation of marriage and affection as the result of a dilatory, disciplinary process.
1. Love at First Sight
In his copious Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Burton distinguishes several forms of love, but this essay looks exclusively at “Heroicall melancholy”: the kind of love that corresponds to sexual desire, to “burning lust”.18 The object of this kind of love is a physical attraction based on beauty: “comelinesse of person, and beauty alone, as men love women with a wanton eye”.19 In marriage, such erotic love is transferred into “nuptiall love”, a “common passion” that is “honest”.20 However, the problem of passion is that it tends to be unstable and exceeds both moderation and marital bounds:
But this love of ours is immoderate, inordinate, and not to bee comprehended in any bounds. It will not containe itself within the union of marriage, or apply to one object, but is a wandring, extravagant, a domineering, a boundlesse, an irrefragable, a destructive passion: sometimes this burning lust rageth after marriage, and then it is properly called Jealousie; sometimes before, and then it is called Heroicall melancholy […].21
The excessive nature of desire is heavily gendered, in Burton’s text as well as in other writings. Burton asks polemically: “Of womens unnaturall, unsatiable lust, what country, what Village doth not complaine?”22 Desire is, of course, not restricted to women. Burton emphasizes the incontinency of lovers more generally: They “cannot containe themselves, but that they will be still kissing.”23 Just a little later, he reinforces the point that lovers cannot control their desire: “They cannot, I say, containe themselves, they will be still not only joyning hands, kissing, but embracing, treading on their toes, &c. diving into their bosomes.”24 This description of love is in line with the difficult status of the passions in early modern culture more generally. “Always on the edge of being out of control”, the passions need “government”: “A moral life educates them, suppresses them, marshals them, holds them back.”25 This view, associated with Plato and the Stoics,26 was tempered by Aristotle, who recognized the passions as powerful motives to be cultivated rather than suppressed, and who had a profound impact on seventeenth-century thought.27 As passion, love occupies a paradoxical position: It is productive in that it provides the intimacy that sustains companionable marriage and secures the increase in children, and perhaps also in wealth, that allows the household to thrive. It can also, however, be wildly destructive, as Burton suggests, begetting “rapes, incests, murders”.28
In early modern discourse, erotic desire strikes suddenly. Its suddenness is reminiscent of the paradigmatic early modern event, the so-called occasion or occasio – a potentially favourable opportunity that may be gone in the blink of an eye. The occasio is often represented as Kairos, a winged figure whose forelock must be grasped. Love shares the speediness of the occasion, as signified by Cupid’s wings, but it reverses the agency of the subject: While one (actively) seizes an occasion, in the case of love one is seized, falling victim to passion. The passion of love puts the lover in a position of suffering that is epitomized by the piercing of the body by Cupid’s arrow. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo laments in the very first scene that his love interest Rosaline will “not be hit / With Cupid’s arrow” (1.1.206–207). In a later scene in the same act, Romeo describes himself as pierced through by Cupid’s dart: “I am too sore empierced with his shaft / To soar with his light feathers” (1.4.19–20). Falling in love is here figured as a sudden wounding, with Cupid’s wings signaling the swiftness of love.
The instantaneity of desire is also conceived as a piercing of the eye: “[S]ight […] is the first step of this unruly love.”29 As the object of heroical love is beauty, desire strikes most often through the sense of sight: “Sight […] convayes those admirable rayes of Beauty and pleasing graces to the heart.”30 Through the eyes as “harbingers of love”, “love is kindled like a fire”.31 The swiftness of desire is conveyed by the image of the fire that blazes up but also, of course, by the expression “love at first sight”.32 When at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet Benvolio suggests a love cure for his cousin Romeo, who is unhappily in love with Rosaline, he plays on the same register of sight. He advises Romeo to “giv[e] liberty unto thine eyes. / Examine other beauties” (1.1.225–226). The phrase suggests that Romeo should eye other beauties so as to temper the impression that Rosaline has made on him. Benvolio advises: “Go thither, and with unattainted eye / Compare her face with some that I shall show, / And I will make thee think thy swan a crow” (1.2.86–88). Romeo denies that any other woman could compare with Rosaline, stresses the “devout religion” of his eyes, and claims that his eyes would be “heretics” if they found any other lady fairer (1.2.89–92). Despite these professions of faithful love, however, Juliet’s radiant beauty immediately captures Romeo’s eyes. It outshines the torches – teaching “the torches to burn bright” (1.5.43) –, impresses itself on his heart, and erases any thought of his former love. Romeo asks rhetorically: “Did my heart love till now?” only to conclude: “Forswear it, sight, / For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.51–52).33
In a play that both uses and parodies Petrarchan conventions, the key role of the eye in matters of love may be largely a Petrarchan legacy, but it also entered early modern English discourses through Neoplatonic sources.34 Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, which was an important source for Burton’s work on love-melancholy, dwells at length on the role of the eye in communicating the beloved’s spirit and in triggering desire:
Therefore, what wonder is it that the eye, wide open and intent upon someone, throws missiles of its own light into near-by eyes and directs also, together with these missiles which are the vehicles of spirits, the bloody vapor which we call spirit? Hence the virulent missile pierces the eyes, and since it is sent from the heart of the one striking the blow, it seeks the heart of the man struck as though [seeking] its proper place. It pierces the heart; but in the back of the heart, which is more resistant, it is condensed and turns into blood. This wandering blood, foreign, so to speak, to the nature of the wounded man, infects his own blood, and the infected blood becomes sick. Hence follows a double bewitchment.35
This passage explores the instantaneity of desire in the form of a sudden piercing of the eyes with “missiles” of spirit. Burton confirms and reiterates this theory: “The rayes, as some thinke, sent from the eyes, carry certaine spirituall vapours with them, and so infect the other party, and that in a moment.”36 The use of “missiles” as a trope and the phrase “in a moment” emphasize the instant effect of this “bewitchment”. Highly susceptible to the beauty of the other, the eyes are the portal through which the desired object enters the subject.37 The idea that love results from first sight and takes hold instantaneously is, of course, still familiar to us, but its physiological reality has been replaced by metaphor. As an early modern paradigm, it was pervasive, featuring in medical as well as literary texts. As noted above, Shakespeare’s love play par excellence, Romeo and Juliet, makes ample use of the paradigm of sudden love through sight.38
2. Marriage and Love
In 1568, Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels under Elizabeth I, and hence responsible for the censorship of plays, published A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in mariage, called the flower of friendshippe. In it, Tilney’s fictional character Maister Pedro argues persuasively in favour of a love match: “For perfect love knitteth loving hearts, in an insoluble knot of amitie.”39 His advice in pursuit of a happy marriage suggests that the instantaneity of love must be managed so as to adapt to the longevity of marriage: “This love must grow by little and little, and that it may be durable, must by degrees take roote in the heart. For hasty love is soon gone.”40 Tilney suggests here that love must adapt to the dilatory process of marriage, which has “a joyfull beginning, and a blessed continuance in amitie, by which all things shall prosper, & come to happie ende.”41 His warning against “hasty love” emphasizes the peculiar temporality of desire which takes hold suddenly, burns forcefully (Burton’s love “is kindled like a fire”),42 and is all too soon extinguished (“soon gone”). To match marriage-as-process, love-as-event must stretch, acquiring consistency and durability.
Henry Smith’s marriage sermon, A Preparative to Marriage (1591), similarly expresses the need for love to settle in, to take hold. He describes the time between contract and marriage as the dilatory period that makes time for such settling in:
Every marriage before it be knit should be contracted, as it is shewed in Exod. 22.16. and Deut. 22.28. which stay betweene the contract and the marriage, was the time of longing for their affection to settle in because the deferring of that which we love, doth kindle the desire, which if it came easilie & speedily unto us, would make us set lesse by it.43
The lengthening of desire through the deferral of consummation leads to its increase and continuation. Deferral allows “affection to settle in”, to “take roote”.44 It becomes a strategy to ensure the longevity of desire that marriage demands. Additionally, deferral enhances the value of the loved object, while speedy consummation lowers its value. This problem is also addressed in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where Prospero interferes with Miranda and Ferdinand’s courtship. He remarks on the precarious value of the love-object: “They are both in either’s powers, but this swift business / I must uneasy make, lest too light winning / Make the prize light” (1.2.451–453).45
Deferral works against haste, but speed and duration are not the only temporal vectors that matter: The synchronicity of affection is another one. Protestant writers are keen to emphasize that husband and wife must act in step. The topos of the “yoke fellow” is a trope of joined movement and labour as well as of synchronized affections:
A wife is called a Yoke fellowe, to shewe that she should helpe her husband to beare his yoke, that is, his griefe must be her griefe; and whether it be the yoke of povertie, or the yoke of envie, or the yoke of sickenesse, or the yoke of imprisonment, she must submit her necke to beare it patientlie with him, or else she is not his yoke fellow, but his yoke, as though she were inflicted upon him for a penaltie […].46
Yoked oxen move together, in perfect synchrony. In this image, the wife carries her husband’s every burden with him, sharing in his economic fate as much as in his affective condition (be it grief or envy). Burton describes this synchrony similarly as the result of rather one-sided adaptation: “A good wife according to Plutarch, should be as a looking-glasse, to represent her husbands face and passion: If he bee pleasant, she should be merry: if hee laugh, she should smile […] and so they should continue in mutuall love one towards another.”47
In his marriage sermon A Bride-Bush (1623), William Whately uses the trope of the “yoke-fellow” to illustrate not just synchronized affections generally, but reciprocal love:
So much love doth one yoke-fellow owe to the other, as either of them owes unto him or her self in a manner. They be one body, and must love each other, as each others self, not alone in that common respect wherein every Christian is bound to love every neighbor as himself, but in this special respect we now speake of, because of the speciall neerenesse that is betwixt them […].48
Here, the metaphor of the “yoke-fellow” is converted into that of husband and wife as one body. If the two are yoked together to form one body, two bodies with potentially differing desires become a unity in which there is no more room for asynchronous or asymmetrical desire.
This sense of perfect synchronicity that knows no temporal lapse between giving and reciprocating love is also evoked by Whately’s emphasis on marital benevolence as a reciprocal debt which must be promptly repaid. While chastity is the first duty of marriage, mutual benevolence is the second. It implies goodwill and a positive disposition between partners, and also comprises sexual relations. When discussing benevolence, Whately emphasizes reciprocity and due time of delivery. Marriage is here configured as an economy of debt and exchange. Referring to 1 Corinthians 7, he invokes “due benevolence” and “indebted benevolence”: “It is a debt you heare, and all debts must be paid, when they be required.”49 Although desire must not be intentionally inflamed, paying this mutual debt within marriage is necessary and has moral and health benefits.50 Conceiving of sexuality in terms of a marital debt ensures procreation even where the synchronicity of love and affection is a fiction. The concept of a mutual debt steps in when desire fails to live up to continuity; it provides a rational conceptual framework that outlives the precarious nature of passion.
3. Dilatory Marriage Plots
Marriage and its disruption by jealousy and illicit desire take centre stage in domestic tragedies such as The Arden of Faversham. The tragedy was published anonymously in 1592, but at least part of it was likely written by Shakespeare.51 In the following, I want to briefly examine how desire disrupts marriage in this play and destroys the household. Alice betrays her husband Thomas Arden by having an affair with Mosby, an upstart steward; together, they plot to murder Arden.52 After a dilatory sequence of failed attempts, they finally succeed, only to be found out immediately after the deed. While here, the requirements of marriage and the demands of desire clash tragically, Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew tells a different tale. Unlike in most comedies, which end with marriage, marriage is but the starting point of The Taming of the Shrew. The main strand of the plot revolves around a husband’s aggressive attempts to regulate his wife’s affections. The Arden of Faversham and The Taming of the Shrew offer very different accounts of marriage, but both relate the failure or success of marriage to desire – in the one case, desire gone astray, and in the other, to successfully managed affections. The Taming of the Shrew uses dilatory disciplinary action that defers “nuptial love” until the wife has learned to match her will and affections to her husband’s. The play links the deferral of satisfaction to the establishment of a patriarchal order as well as to an affective conditioning.
3.1 Disruptive Desire: The Arden of Faversham
The Arden of Faversham opens with a highly felicitous moment in Arden’s life. His friend Franklin asks Arden to “cheer up”, as the Duke of Somerset has just granted Arden “[a]ll the lands of the Abbey of Faversham” (Scene 1, l.5).53 Arden’s socio-economic status is ambiguous: He describes himself as “by birth a gentleman of blood” (Scene 1, l.35).54 In early modern England, the term gentleman, however, was notoriously vague: It referred to a socially mobile group which included not just “old bloodlines and ancient deeds”, but also wealthy newcomers.55 The play hints at Arden’s possible commercial occupation: Arden has business at “the quay” where he has “goods […] to unload” (Scene 1, l.89–90). Jeffrey S. Doty describes “Arden’s social position” as “insecure”: “He is an arriviste rather than a ‘gentleman of the blood.’”56 The deeds which he receives from the Duke set him up for the life of a landowner, an occupation that befits the landed gentry better than commercial dealings. Arden’s reply to Franklin’s request that he “cheer up” establishes a stark contrast between his latest socio-economic success and the failure of his marriage.57 Alice’s desire for Mosby, who is clearly a social upstart, threatens Arden’s life and estate, offering an example of the destructive force of lust that Burton warns against. Alice imagines Arden’s dispossession and anticipates his death when she tells her lover Mosby: “My saving husband hoards up bags of gold / To make our children rich, and now is he / Gone to unload the goods that shall be thine […]” (Scene 1, l.219–221).
The inconstant nature of female desire is topical in early modern England,58 and also features heavily in this play. Franklin tries to comfort Arden, who suffers from his wife’s infidelity, by claiming that this is just what women are like: “Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange / that women will be false and wavering” (Scene 1, l.20–21). Although the murderous couple plan on getting married once Arden is dead, Mosby, the lover, assumes that, just like any other woman, Alice will always be inconstant: “A woman’s love is as the lightning flame, / Which even in bursting forth consumes itself” (Scene 1, l.206–207). It appears that desire in women is not just quick to be inflamed, but also remarkably short-lived. The inconstancy of desire is ill-matched to the consistency of affection that marriage tracts demand. This is not just illustrated by the flame that consumes itself, but also by Mosby’s fear that he, too, will one day be cuckolded: “You have supplanted Arden for my sake, / And will extirpen me to plant another” (Scene 8, l.40–41). Later, Mosby ruminates: “Why, what’s love without true constancy?” (Scene 10, l.95). Mosby’s concern with “a woman’s love” betrays his worries about women’s ungovernable desire.59 Excessive desire ultimately destroys Arden’s life and a household that is on the rise. Alice herself says as much: “Might I without control / Enjoy thee still, then Arden should not die. / But, seeing I cannot, therefore let him die” (Scene 1, l.273–275).
At the root of the murderous action in The Arden of Faversham lies erotic desire that strays beyond marital bounds. With its prominent depiction of an unfaithful woman and an illegitimate lover who suspects that Alice will always be unfaithful, the play posits desire as an incalculable and highly disruptive gendered threat to the long-term enterprise that constitutes marriage and oeconomy. Such wayward desire is facilitated by Arden’s “misgovernment”: To counter rumours about Mosby and his wife, he invites Mosby to frequent his house even more.60 Furthermore, the source of the play, Holinshed’s Chronicles, suggests that Arden has an excessive streak as well, although it is not an erotic one: Holinshed refers “repeatedly” to his “avarice”,61 “present[ing] Arden as condoning Alice’s adultery because of his own greed and ambition”.62 Rather than reproducing this, “the play depicts Arden ambiguously”.63 Catherine Belsey notes the co-existence of “two versions of Arden” in both the Chronicles and the play: “as loving husband and rapacious landowner”.64
Seeing how easily the lovers quarrel and turn against each other, dilation, in this episodic plot that ambles towards murder, makes space not for growing desire but, at least on Alice’s and Mosby’s side, for anxieties and worries about the success of their project. It is no wonder that dilation here does not allow desire to “take roote”,65 as the illicit lovers do not abstain from sexual satisfaction. While their marriage must wait, their sex life is not put on hold. Although Mosby declares in the very first scene that he will not have sex with Alice (again) until after her husband is dead (Scene 1, l.428–439), because he has sworn to it, he backpedals just a little later in the same scene: “I hope, now master Arden is from home, / You’ll give me leave to play your husband’s part?” (Scene 1, l. 631–632). Desire here remains opposed to any kind of constancy, including that of a half-hearted chastity vow (Mosby has, of course, already played the husband part with Alice).
3.2 Deferring Satisfaction: The Taming of the Shrew
The main plot of The Taming of the Shrew depicts the dilatory, disciplinary process through which a newly wedded, shrewish Katherine is “tamed” to fill her role as a wife to the full satisfaction of her husband. The patriarchal taming project has received a lot of critical attention, but this is less true for the erotic implications of the comedy’s entanglement of mastery and deferred satisfaction. In early modern England, the strategy of delay itself had, as Patricia Parker points out, not just a rhetorical but also an erotic content derived from classical and medieval culture: “Dilatio” refers to “the deferral of consummation [which] is thus its dilation, or delay, a specifically feminine plot in which holding a suitor at a distance creates both a space in between and an intervening time.”66 Before looking more closely at dilation in Shakespeare’s comedy, I want to briefly explore how the beginning and ending – the Induction and Petruccio’s final lines – frame the play with deferred desire and the promise of a final act of satisfaction.
The Taming of the Shrew begins with an Induction, in which the drunken rogue Sly awakens to find himself a lord. In fact, a real lord has found Sly sleeping it off in the streets and has taken him home to amuse himself with an elaborate conceit. When he awakens, Sly is told that he is a lord who was afflicted by a “strange lunacy” (Induction, 2.27) and lost his wit.67 While he has finally awakened, he cannot remember anything of his former life. The ludicrous highpoint of this charade is the appearance of the fake lord’s fake wife, who is impersonated by a cross-dressing page. Once Sly begins to believe in earnest that he is really a lord and this his lady (“Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?” (Induction, 2.66)), he tells her in no uncertain terms that he wants to take her to bed: “Madam, undress you and come now to bed” (Induction, 2.114). The faux lady prevents her exposure by asking for a small delay, under the pretext that Sly must first recover his health more fully. In the meantime, Sly and “his” household sit down to watch a play – which is, of course, The Taming of the Shrew. Given this Induction, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the play picks up on and reiterates the theme of delayed satisfaction. Only at the very end of The Taming of the Shrew is the marriage finally consummated and the latent erotic component of the “taming” becomes manifest. It is only after Katherine’s submission speech that Petruccio finally asks her “to bed”: “Come, Kate, we’ll to bed” (5.2.190).
Just as the Induction introduces real sexual desire in a fake marriage, it also introduces fake submission. In the figure of the crossdressing page, wifely obedience is mere make-believe: “My husband and my lord, my lord and husband, / I am your wife in all obedience” (Induction 2.103–104). Later, it is Kate who plays the perfectly submissive wife. As Coppélia Kahn notes, commenting on Katherine’s final speech: “Though she pretends to speak earnestly on behalf of her own inferiority, she actually treats us to a pompous, wordy, holier-than-thou sermon which delicately mocks the sermons her husband has delivered to and about her.”68 Both real desire and fake submission as potential ingredients of marriage spill over from the Induction to the taming plot, endowing the dilatory marriage plot of Katherine and Petruccio with an erotic subtext and giving Katherine’s highly exaggerated performance of wifely submission a playful, theatrical twist. A sequel to The Taming of the Shrew, John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, builds strongly on the patriarchal and sexual overtones of delay in the play.69 The play begins with Petrucchio marrying anew after Katherine has died. His new wife Maria proceeds to tame the choleric Petrucchio with the help of a sex strike, appropriating delayed satisfaction as a strategy of resistance to patriarchal subjection.
Where can one locate love in the taming plot of The Taming of the Shrew? The play first poses the question of love when Katharine’s father stipulates her love as a condition for the marriage.70 Petruccio has manifestly materialistic reasons for marrying Katherine, as he is interested in her dowry, but he also appears to like her temperament: In the courting scene, a scene of bawdry wit, both give as good as they get. After this scene, which demonstrates that their temperaments are evenly matched (2.1.182–282), Katherine remains uncharacteristically silent while Petruccio claims her love (2.1.306–321). The scene is ambiguous, its meaning to be clarified in performance. Is she, despite her remarkable eloquence, silenced by his rhetorical turns and tricks? Or does she actually like him? In terms of genre, the spirit of comedy and the traditional happy ending demand the involvement of love: The play ends with a public show of harmony and the promise of lovemaking. As Kahn writes in her feminist analysis of the play: “Finally, we must remember that Shakespearean comedy celebrates love; love by means of any contrivance of plot or character.”71 She even contends that “Shakespeare wants to make us feel that Kate has not been bought or sold, but has given herself out of love”.72 Be that as it may, the dilatory strategy of deferring satisfaction until Katherine submits to Petruccio’s will and matches her affections to his makes space not only for a lesson in subjection and government;73 it also affords an interval between the marriage vows and their consumption that may leave time enough to nurture eros.
Desire and the deferral of satisfaction resurface in various forms in Petruccio’s plot, which aims at fashioning the kind of synchrony between husband and wife that is characterized by the trope of the wife as “yoke-fellow” who bends her will and affections to her husband’s.74 The deferral of satisfaction is Petruccio’s main disciplinary strategy to instill “continency” in his wife – a form of restraint that relates generally to the appetites, but has unmistakable erotic overtones when it becomes the subject of a sermon delivered in the bedchamber of the newly married couple (as discussed below). In the play, deferral of satisfaction takes various forms: Petruccio offers and withholds food and clothes to subject Katherine to his will. The play portrays a series of “meals interrupted”.75 As David B. Goldstein points out, “Food in the play carries meaning both as a vehicle of infantile nourishment and as a metaphor for erotic desire.”76 Continency also has a strong verbal component. Before marriage, Katherine is characterized by excessive “fretting”, which produces “linguistic excess”.77 Her husband seeks to control her speech absolutely, suppressing any attempts at contradiction. Only once she accepts his interpretation of events, no matter how absurd or visibly false, does he give her access to food and clothes and social entertainment.78 Katherine’s interest in fashionable clothing evokes the frequently female gendering of luxuria, which conflates the desire of costly goods with sexual lust.79 Similarly, in early modern culture, loquaciousness was often associated with a lack of sexual restraint.80
The erotic overtones of a lack of restraint become manifest in the lesson that Petruccio delivers to Katherine on their wedding night and in their bedchamber: Instead of consummating the marriage, he subjects Katherine to “a sermon of continency” (4.1.172). The performance itself, however, lacks continency, suggesting a state of heightened passion. As a servant reports: He “rails, and swears, and rates, that she, poor soul, / Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak, / And sits as one new risen from a dream” (4.1.173–175). As erotic strategy, deferral functions as a counterpoint to their all too hasty wedding. If the advice of Protestant writers, that one must prolong courtship in order to allow love to take root, is to be taken seriously, the deferral of satisfaction in The Taming of the Shrew may be an amatory as well as a disciplinary strategy. As an amatory strategy, deferral intensifies desire, allowing it to take hold; as a disciplinary one, it teaches restraint and ensures that the wife’s desire is not “wayward” but matches her husband’s affections. Petruccio teaches Kate to subject her will and desire to his, instituting a patriarchal structure of government. It is undoubtedly difficult and uncomfortable to locate erotic desire in a play that derives dramatic tension and comedy from patriarchal attempts to aggressively take control of a woman’s behaviour. And yet it seems to me that The Taming of the Shrew performs submission not only as a political tool, but also as a form of erotic play, imagining the successful integration of eros into a patriarchal and domestic calculus. The early modern household is the site where economic, political, and affective concerns intersect. Natasha Korda suggests quite rightly that Petruccio teaches Katherine how to consume in an emerging market society,81 as the household’s management (oikonomia) and the wife’s spending practices played a crucial role in its economic success. As early modern protestant writers saw it, the household relied on skilled management, order, and a gendered division of labour. Marital love played an important role in facilitating and consolidating its order and economic success.82
In terms of sexual politics, the scandalous nature of this plot resides in part in the way in which a patriarchal framework of undeniably aggressive subjection becomes a site of eroticism. Katherine’s playful and parodic submission ensures not just a sense of order, but is itself a site of erotic energy. The sense of playful engagement derives from Katherine’s witty interpretation of the role of the submissive wife. Her take on the role involves impersonating the perfect wife, to the point where it capsizes into satire and ridicules Petrucchio’s tyrannical claim for absolute authority. The ending of the play confirms the impression that Petruccio’s power play has a sexual dimension. Only once Katherine praises her husband and master publicly and in hyperbolic terms does he finally take her to bed, presumably for the first time. The deferral of sexual pleasure to this climactic moment of exemplary obedience highlights the sexual frisson that their power play involves. Domestic government emerges here not least as a site of erotic pleasure. Rather than constituting a stable matrix of authority and subjection, domesticity in The Taming of the Shrew is characterized by ambiguous power plays in which authority remains vulnerable to parodic subversion and in which aggressive domination has a sexual component. From a patriarchal point of view, the marriage proves successful: It provides greater wealth for the oikos and enhances its reputation as an exemplary site of order that is based on patriarchal authority and love.
4. Concluding Remarks
To conclude, I want to return to my initial hypothesis of a conflict in early modern discourse between the temporalities of love and marriage. The discourse of an event character of love as that which seizes the subject unexpectedly, suddenly, and forcefully sits uneasily with that of marriage as a dilatory process. Various kinds of texts, from marriage sermons to plays, suggest that for love to be successfully integrated into the calculus of domestic economy, it must stretch from a moment of infatuation to a lengthy interval that allows for a deepening of affection and for gendered adaption in which a wife matches her own will and affection to her husband’s. Such dilation can be achieved through a strategic deferral of satisfaction as in The Taming of the Shrew, where it disarms the excessive and disruptive force of erotic energy, albeit not for long – the incalculability of love remains a threat to marriage and any economic calculus. As a passion, love remains ambiguous. It is a powerful motive for marriage and constitutes the amatory glue that props up companionate marriage and the household, but it is not easily stabilized and retains a disruptive force. If clergymen attempted to prove that a lengthy interval before consummation may allow love to grow into a lasting affection, theatre may be more interested in the eroticism that is derived from the postponement of satisfaction.
Bibliography
Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 3, ed. by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 51 (emphasis in original).
Marion A. Wells: The Secret Wound: Love-Melancholy and Early Modern Romance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 22.
Wells: The Secret Wound, p. 22.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 53.
Wells: The Secret Wound, pp. 29–30.
The classical interest in love as a potentially transcendent force, together with its homoerotic implications, was revived in the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino’s work in particular is noteworthy in this respect, but, “as a trained physician”, he also “draws heavily on the medical sources” (Wells: The Secret Wound, p. 19). Ficino’s Commentary was an important source for Burton.
Robert Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons: Henry Smith’s ‘A Preparative to Marriage’ (1591) and William Whately’s ‘A Bride-Bush’ (1623), London: Routledge, 2016, p. 3. In his Introduction, Matz explores not only the special role of marriage in Protestant discourses, but also responds to critics who argue against ascribing an overly formative role to these discourses. Matz outlines differences between pre- and post-Reformation writings and highlights the popularizing function of reformation discourses: “[W]hatever the sources of a new celebration of marriage, in England it was reformation Protestantism – positioned against Catholic orthodoxy – that continued to promote these ideas and expand their reach” (p. 8). Mary Beth Rose confirms this when she notes: “Although it did not originate with the Protestant (largely Puritan) theologians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this optimistic vision of marriage was articulated explicitly, fully, and repeatedly by them” (“Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy”, in: The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 12–42, here p. 29). She describes the crucial shift of the English Renaissance as one in which “conjugal loyalty and affection replaced celibacy as the officially idealized pattern of heterosexual conduct” (p. 16) and perceives a “significant increase in the prestige of marriage that, as historians have shown, took place in the Renaissance” (p. 37).
In his essay “Of Love”, Francis Bacon highlights the importance of love for procreation: “Nuptiall love maketh Mankinde […]” (The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. by Michael Kiernan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 33, emphasis in original).
Whately comments on marriage as a preventive measure in A Bride-Bush: “Now God hath ordained matrimony to prevent whoredome, even in those that want the gift of continency; that is, of restraining their passions in this kinde” (Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, p. 120). See also Matz on the role of marriage as a “permissible outlet for sexual desire” in pre- and post-Reformation writings (p. 4).
Bacon: “Of Love”, p. 31.
Section 2.1.1. of the third volume of The Anatomy of Melancholy is titled as follows: “Causes of Heroicall Love, Temperature, full Diet, Idlenesse, Place, Climat, &c.” (p. 58); the following subsection lists further causes in its title: “Other Causes of Love Melancholy, Sight, Beauty from the Face, Eyes, other Parts, and how it pierceth” (p. 65).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 445 (emphasis in original).
Whately: A Bride-Bush, in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, p. 118.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 147.
William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, ed. by René Weis, The Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Specifically, I briefly discuss a treatise by the Master of the Revels: Edmund Tilney’s Discourse on the Duties in Marriage (1568), as well as two Protestant works: Henry Smith’s A Preparative to Marriage (1591) and William Whately’s A Bride-Bush (1623), both in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 54 (emphasis in original).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 22.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 52.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 54 (emphasis in original).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 55.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 143.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 145.
Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis: Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 2.
Cummings and Sierhuis: Passions and Subjectivity, p. 1.
Christopher Tilmouth: Passions Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. As Tilmouth states: “Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics gives rise to a very different tradition of governance, one which emphasizes the cultivation (rather than suppression) of the passions” (p. 20).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 54.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 65.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 66.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 66 (emphasis in original).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 67 (emphasis in original).
Juliet’s love for Romeo is equally predicated on the event of sight: “My only love sprung from my only hate, / Too early seen unknown, and known too late! / Prodigious birth of love it is to me / That I must love a loathed enemy” (1.5.137–140).
See Chapter 5 in Joan Lord Hall’s Sexual Love and Romantic Desire in Shakespeare: ‘Rich in Will’ for an account of how Romeo and Juliet plays with and parodies Petrarchan conventions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Hall also describes the significance of the eyes as a Petrarchan as well as a Neoplatonic legacy (p. 126).
Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium: The Text and a Translation, with an Introduction by Sears Reynolds Jayne, Columbia: University of Missouri, 1944, p. 223.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 88. He also recounts Ficino’s account of love between Phaedrus and Lycias (p. 89).
Ficino links the piercing of the eye with the beauty of the object: “The appearance of a man, which because of an interior goodness graciously given him by God, is beautiful to see, frequently shoots a ray of his splendor, through the eyes of those looking at him, into their souls. Drawn by this spark like a fish on a hook, the souls hasten towards the one who is attracting them” (Commentary, p. 183).
See also Friar Laurence’s reference to the eyes in Romeo and Juliet (2.3.61–64).
Tilney: A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in mariage, called the flower of friendshippe, imprinted at London: By Henrie Deham, Anno 1571, B4r. All quotations from the 1571 edition of Tilney’s treatise on Early English Books Online / EEBO (spelling modernized). ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/books/briefe-pleasant-discourse-duties-mariage-called/docview/2240875875/se-2.
Tilney: A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in marriage, B4r.
Tilney: A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in marriage, B5r–B5v.
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 66 (emphasis in original).
Henry Smith: A Preparative to Marriage, in: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, pp. 53–104, here p. 60. That desire may or even should be kindled is a remarkable feature of this sermon. Smith later explains in more detail why sexuality within marriage is lawful and honorable: “Lastly, if marriage be a remedie against sinne, then marriage it selfe is no sinne: for if marriage it selfe were a sin, we might not marrie for any cause, because we must not do the least evill that the greatest good may come of it: and if marriage be not a sinne, then the duties of marriage are not sinne, that is, the secret of marriage is not evill, and therefore Paul saith, not only Marriage is honourable, but the bed is honourable, that is, even the action of marriage is as lawfull as marriage” (p. 68, emphasis in original).
Tilney: A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in marriage, B4r.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, The Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Smith: A Preparative to Marriage, in: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, pp. 88–89 (emphasis in orginal).
Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 53 (emphasis in orginal).
Whately: A Bride-Bush (1623), in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, pp. 105–257, here p. 136.
Whately: A Bride-Bush, p. 121 (emphasis in original, in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons). Matz reminds Whately’s modern-day readers that “‘due benevolence’, like ‘mutual enjoyment,’ refers to marital sex” (p. 121, note 33).
Whately calls for moderation to preserve one’s health: “In a word, marriage must be used as seldome and sparingly, as may stand with the neede of the persons married: for excesse this way doth weaken the body, and shorten life: but a sparing enjoyment would helpe the health, and preserve the body from diverse diseases in some constitutions” (Whately: A Bride-Bush, p. 124, in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons).
P. Jackson Macdonald makes a strong argument for the quarrel scene and a few other scenes as having been written by Shakespeare in his article “Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene in Arden of Faversham”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 57.3 (2006), pp. 249–293, see especially pp. 257–262 and pp. 270–275. See also Gary Taylor on the possible collaboration of Shakespeare and Thomas Watson: “Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, and Four Forgotten Playwrights”, in: The Review of English Studies 71.302 (2020), pp. 867–895.
The murder of Arden is chronicled by Holinshed in the “first entry for the year 1551” (in the Chronicles from 1577 and 1587); Richard Helgerson remarks on its “unusual” length (“Murder in Faversham: Holinshed’s Impertinent History”, in: Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. by Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 133–158, here p. 133).
Anon., The Arden of Faversham, ed. by Catherine Richardson, Arden Early Modern Drama, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Alice confirms Arden’s gentlemanly status when she gives Mosby a dressing-down (Scene 1, l.203).
Jeffrey S. Doty: “Networks and Dramatic Form in Arden of Faversham”, in: Renaissance Drama 51.1 (2023), pp. 1–28, here p. 10.
Doty: “Networks and Dramatic Form in Arden of Faversham”, pp. 13–14.
See Catherine Richardson, who suggests in Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) that the beginning of the play “set[s] Arden’s authority as a local landowner against his impotence as a husband, through his inability to control his wife’s meetings” (p. 105).
See Burton: Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 55.
Mosby’s speech is in answer to a longer speech by Alice in which she questions Arden’s right to govern her, who “am to rule myself” (Scene 10, l.84). Mosby’s reply betrays, as Alison Findlay suggests in A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), some anxiety about how to maintain an orderly household if the mistress refuses to be governed (p. 151).
Richardson: Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England, p. 116. Richardson focuses on domestic failure, but Catherine Belsey and, later, Frances Dolan also interrogate the political implications of domestic drama in “Alice Arden’s Crime”, in: Renaissance Drama 13 (1981), pp. 83–102, and “The Subordinate(’s) Plot: Petty Treason and the Forms of Domestic Rebellion”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 43.3 (1992), pp. 317–340.
Belsey: “Alice Arden’s Crime”, p. 86.
Dolan: “The Subordinate(’s) Plot”, p. 330.
Dolan: “The Subordinate(’s) Plot”, p. 330.
Belsey: “Alice Arden’s Crime”, p. 86.
Tilney: A briefe and pleasant discourse of duties in marriage, B4r.
Patricia Parker: “Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices”, in: Poetics Today 5.3 (1984), pp. 519–535, here p. 528.
William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon. The Arden Shakespeare, London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Kahn, Coppélia: “‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Shakespeare’s Mirror of Marriage”, in: Modern Language Studies 5.1 (1975), pp. 88–102, here p. 98.
John Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed, in: Women on The Early Modern Stage, introduced by Emma Smith, New Mermaid Anthologies, London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
After Petruccio has enquired after her marriage portion and Baptista has satisfied him, Baptista tells him that he must first obtain her love (2.1.127–128).
Kahn: “The Taming of the Shrew”, p. 97.
Kahn: “The Taming of the Shrew”, p. 97.
“Thus have I politicly begun my reign, / And ‘tis my hope to end successfully”, says Petruccio (4.1.177–178).
Whately: A Bride-Bush (1623), in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, p. 136, and Smith: A Preparative to Marriage, in Matz: Two Early Modern Marriage Sermons, p. 88.
David B. Goldstein: “Homeschooling the Girl Stomach”, in: The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play, ed. by Heater C. Easterling and Jennifer Flaherty, London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2021, p. 38.
Goldstein: “Homeschooling the Girl Stomach”, p. 48.
See Natasha Korda and her discussion of “the shrew’s linguistic excess” in “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming of the Shrew”, in: Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (1996), pp. 109–131, here p. 115.
“Shakespeare’s Petruccio […] aggressively pursues a strategy of domination and control over both food and speech” (Goldstein, “Homeschooling the Girl Stomach”, p. 39).
Ian W. Archer notes that, “Consumption was a moral problem because the desire for goods was linked with sexual desire. The Christian tradition had conflated luxuria and lust: luxury was equated with desire, and desire with disobedience” (“Material Londoners?”, in: Material London, ca. 1600, ed. by Lena Cowen Orlin, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp. 174–192, here p. 186). Archer also refers to the frequent gendering of consumption: “As Karen Newman has observed, consumption was seen as an activity to which women were conspicuously (and dangerously) prone” (p. 185). See also Karen Newman: “City Talk: Women and Commodification”, in: Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. by David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, New York and London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 181–195. Newman points out that, “In the early seventeenth century, woman became the target for contemporary ambivalence toward that process. She is represented in the discourses of Jacobean London as at once consumer and consumed – her supposed desire for goods is linked to her sexual availability” (p. 184).
In Fashioning Femininity, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991, Karen Newman establishes the link between verbal and sexual incontinency: “An open mouth and immodest speech are tantamount to open genitals and immodest acts” (p. 11). Valerie Traub confirms this: “‘Loose in body and tongue’ was a common condemnation, linking female erotic transgression to gossip and scolding” (“Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare”, in: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 129–146, here p. 130).
See Korda’s discussion of how Kate learns to consume “not for herself, in her own interest, but for that of her husband” (“Household Kates”, p. 128), “demonstrating both Petruccio’s ability to afford superfluous expenditure and his control over his wife’s consumption” (p. 127). Please also see my essay on precarious consumption and gender in The Taming of the Shrew and other plays which is forthcoming in a collection edited by Maximilian Bergengruen and Elisabeth Weiß-Sinn (in German).
As I noted elsewhere, in the prescriptive literature of the period, “Marriage constituted the neuralgic point of the household: the household’s existence was seriously threatened by marital strife and mismanagement, but a couple that worked well together could turn their house into a place of abundance.” See my discussion of the early modern oikos in Economies of Early Modern Drama: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 36–47, here p. 43.