"unto my wife 1 would not be the bride": rich widows and anxious suitors in thomas middleton's

362 Pages·2000·20.95 MB·English

"UNTO MY WIFE 1W OULD NOT BE THE BRIDE": RICH WIDOWS AND
ANXIOUS SUITORS IN THOMAS MIDDLETON'S COMEDIES
Jennifer Marie Panek
A thesis subrnitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
O Copy~@~bty Jennifer Marie Panek 1999
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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
'"Unto my wife I would not be the bride': Rich Widows and
Anxious Suitors in Thomas Middleton's Cornedies"
Doctor of Philosophy in English' 1999
By Jennifer Marie Panek
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
This thesis contextualizes the remanying widow and her suitors in Thomas
Middleton's comedies within the social, economic, and sexual concems surrounding a
weaithy widow's remamage in early seventeenth-century London. While schoiars have
viewed the early modem constmct of the "Iusty widow" as a dissuasive tactic of a culturc
which fiowned upon femaie remarriage, the consmct fiequently works instead to enable
remarriage, re-circulating widows' property back into the male-controlled economy. To
an impecunious young man, marrying a prosperous widow was both attractive and
threatening, as the wealthier, experienced woman was feared to dominate her husband.
To assuage his anxieties over entering this potentially emasculating marriage, the suitor
compensated for his threatened maculinity by fantasizing the widow's need of his sexual
virility, a fantasy on which the theatre capitalized with comedies eliciting and then
managing such anxieties as they ceiebrated a man's conquest of a widow through her
lust. Middleton, who staged seven comic remarrying widows over his career, gradually
undermined and mocked this fantasy, exposing the male anxieties beneath it.
After an introduction questioning scholarly opinions conceming the early modem
English condemnation of femaie remarriage, Chapter One uses a range of penod texts to
argue that the idea of a widow's Iust helped assuage men's fears that she would prove an
ungovemable wife. Chapter Two examines fifteen comedies between 1600 and 1625,
showing how fears and desires about widows and remamiage merged with theatncal
conventions in the work of Middleton's contemporaries. Chapter Three then analyzes
three of Middleton's earliest comedies which conform fairly closely to conventional
views of remarrying widows: ïke Phoenix (1 604), The Puritan (16 06),a nd Michaehas
Term (1606). Chapter Four shows how A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) and No Wii,
No Help Like a Wornan 's (1 6 13) begin to expose the male self-interest and anxiety which
constnict the stereotypes of the widow. The comedies in Chapter Five-More
Dissem blers Besides Wornen (16 15 ) and The Widow ( 2 6 1 6)-continue this kind of
undermining, with The Widow providing Middleton's most explicit exposure of how the
theatrical fantasy of the "lusty widow" debases women to assuage the anxieties of men.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to rny supervisor, Leslie Thomson, for patience, provocation, and
proofing, and to my advisory committee members, Anne Lancashire and Julian Patrick,
who gave each chapter of this thesis time and attention far beyond the obligations of a
committee.
T'en, to Chante1 Lavoie, Sarah Winters, Andy Bethune, Jemy McKemcy, Elaine Ostr),
Kim Brown, and Heather Walsh, who in person or via long-distance phone calls, kept me
sane in the days immediately before the defence.
Also, to Alan Romkema., who started me down this road, and to Christy Luckyj, who kept
me on it. And to Dan and my family, for being so certain I'd do it well, even when they
didn't know what it was.
Finally, I'd like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, and the University of Toronto English Department for the fûnding which has
enabled me to complete this thesis.
Table of Contents
Introduction ........................................................... 1
ChapterOne .......................................................... 24
ChapterTwo ......................................................... 94
ChapterThree ........................................................ 168
ChapterFou ........................................................ 224
ChapterFive ......................................................... 271
Conclusion .......................................................... 321
Works Cited and Consuited ............................................. 329
"Unto my wife 1 would not be the bride": Rich Widows and
Anxious Suitors in Thomas Middfeton's Comedies
Introduction
Any study of the widow and her suitors in early modem English drama must take
into account the existence of a widespread scholarly opinion that sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century English culture disapproved of and sought to discourage remarriage
for women, a disapproval in unsurpnsing accord with the overall patriarchd suppression
of women's sexuality and fieedom of choice. Consensus on this condemnatory attitude to
a widow's remarriage is not universal, but social historians and literary cntics alike
fumish it with more support than dispute. Arnong social historians, Alan Macfarlane
(Marriage 234-36) and Minam Slater (1 06-07) describe early modem English society as
tolerating and even encouraging remarriage for both sexes; others, however, paint a
thoroughly different picture. For instance, in her investigation of declining remanîage
rates in Abingdon in the later seventeenth century, Barbara Todd cites Vives' The
Instruction of a Christian Woman (trims. 15 29), Erasmus ' De Yidua Chrisriana (1 529),
St. Paul, and a 1620 Engiish manuscript treatise titled The Widnowe hdeed to argue that
throughout the seventeenth-century the English widow faced both doctrinal opposition to
remarriage and "a barrage of propaganda discouraging her fiom remarrying"
("Demographic" 430). Antonia Fraser reports that second mariages were offen seen as a
form of bigamy or cuckoldry (82)' while Janet Thompson and Miranda Chaytor find
societal disapproval of widows' remarrîage to have been strong enough to erupt in the
ritualized hostility of charivari (Thompson 37; Chaytor 43). Among literary critics who
undertake historicdly informed analyses of widows in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,
the idea that early modem English widows were discouraged fiom taking second
husbands has been opposed by Frank Wadsworth and Lila Geller, who point ou? that
remarriage for widows was sanctioned by Protestant doctrine and was therefore far from
'
universally condernned; however, the pervasiveness of the belief that Elizabethan and
Jacobean society frowned on fernale remarriage is indicated by the fact that GelIer7s 199 1
article must argue against its influence on criticism of Thomas Midd1eton7sM ore
Dissemblers Besides Wornen (1 6 15) thirty-five years afier Wadsworth undertook the
same task for John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi ( 16M ).' Moreover, in a recent shidy
of Hamlet's Gertrude, Dorothea Kehler observes that although English reformed clencs
distanced themselves from the CathoIic valorization of celibacy by oficially approving
of remarriage, popular resistance to female remarriage remained largely unchanged. As
an example of "persistent conventional sentiments," she quotes the Duke of Milan fiom
More Dissemblers:
For once to marry
Js honourable in woman, and her ignorance
Stands for a virtue, coming neufa nd fresh;
But second marriage shows desire in flesh
Thence lust, and heat, and cornmon custorn grows. . . .(2.1.76-80)
"Most Protestant thinkers and polemicists," she adds, ". . . knew in principle that they
should feel differently. Even while urging remarriage, however, they could not escape its
age-old coding as a betrayal of the deceased" (403). Sirnilarly, Margaret Lael Mikesell
notes that both literary portrayals of widows and "didactic tracts which address practice
as well as theory" (narnely Alexander Niccholes' A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving
I See also Pearson 126, who remarks that Eiizabethan society condoned early remarriage to protect widows
from fortune hunters.
'
Al1 dates of plays are from Annds ofEngIish Drama 975-1700 and are approximate.
[1615]) show that the traditional Catholic antipathy to a wornan's remarriage remained
highly influential in the culture despite Protestant teachings (270). Theodora A.
Jankowski descnbes a different kind of ambivalence: remarriage was urged for widows
who inherited too iittle to support themselves and risked becoming fmancial burdens, for
they would then "again become governed by a man and thus acceptable to the patriarchai
social structure." Men, however, found fernale remarriage a threatening reminder of their
own mortality and replaceability (35).
There is an even stronger consensus on the function of the stereotype, so aptly
summarized by Middleton's Duke, of the "lusty widow." Shelter from the infamy of this
epithet, which loomed large in both religious and secular ideas about widows, might be
sought in a prudent remarrÏage arranged by the widow's farnily (Pearson 140-41) or,
preferably, in a celibate life of dutiful modesty and propriety (Todd, "Demographic"
430), but the power of the rtereotype was that it coerced widows, at the risk of their
reputation, to eschew any kind of behaviour-from independent business enterprise to
remarriage for "love" to an attractive young man-that could be construed as evidence of
unchastity or lustfulness. Faced with the threat of a wornan who was legally,
economically and sexually independent, men constructed and deployed the notion of the
sexually rapacious widow as a kind of ideological substitute for the official male control
fiom which she had slipped free. Linda Woodbridge, while enumerating arnong the
stereotype's contributing factors "male wishful thinking" about widows as "an easy
sexual mark," and "nagging worry on the part of husbands about what was to become of
their wealth and their name if they predeceased their wives," concludes that '%the
conjunction of charges of lust with widowhood's inherent fieedom of action combines
with other literary evidence to suggest that the charge of Iechery was a smear tactic
against assertiveness and liberty" (1 78).3 Charles Carlton wites of how men feared that
widows' sexuality would "disrupt the social order" (127), and Geller explains that "the
literary convention of the insatiate widow may well be a rdection of societal fear.
Society in general or her [the widow's] farnily in particular may prornote the vow [of
perpetual widowhood] to prevent the control of her property passing to her new husband,
or to control her sexuality so that she produces no more children to become competing
heirs" (288). A similar explanation for why widows were slandered with a reputation for
"hypersexuality" is offered by Jankowski? who observes that "branding widows as social
pariahs . . . served to contain that one group of women who could exist with a legal
identity and without direct control of a man" (36). In general, scholars agree that
remarriage was equated with lust, and that accusations of lust were an effective tactic to
scare widows away from remarriage, as Vives makes clear in his rebuke to widows
wishing for a second husband: "confesse thine own vitiousness. For none of you taketh a
husband but to the intente that she will lie with him, nor except her Iust pricke her"
(D6v). Remarriage, according to "Elizabethan moralists," was "at best, a kind of legal
adultery, at worst, an overt form of lust" (Brustein 41)' and "the widow's 'honour' lay in
remaining single" (Todd, "Demographic" 430). Since, as many of the penod's comedies
make clear, the wealthy widow was also a highly desirable cornmodity in the mmiage
market, she found herself caught in an unhappy paradox: while mercenary suitors exerted
an intense pressure on her to remarry, only by abjuring remarriage could she be counted
chaste and virtuous (Juneja, "Widow" S. 1 1- 13).
'
The idea of the "lusty widow" stereotype as a curb to widows' fieedom appears first in Pearson 140, and
again in MacDonald 17- 18, whom Woodbridge cites. Unlike Woodbridge, Pearson suggests that fear of this
slander hurried widows into the protection of second marriages.