The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh the sweet birds, O how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth an edge,
The Winter’s Tale, 4.3 5-7
It caused a “death” of sorts in both The Winter’s Tale and Much Ado About Nothing. Troilus is devastated by it in Troilus and Cressida. It creates an instant hatred between two minor characters in Henry V. Though it doesn’t go so far in The Taming of the Shrew, the presence of it is undeniable. Throughout so many of Shakespeare’s plays, the fear of another man “stealing” into your sheets and either taking your woman or making you into a cuckold permeates. Reflecting on the plays we’ve read this semester, I feel as though the discussions we’ve had about them have enlightened me to the world Shakespeare lived in. That being said, I feel as though a key component of Shakespeare’s world seems to be cuckoldry. The fear of cuckoldry seems to be quite universal for men during Elizabethan-Jacobean England, but why? Of course, it’s quite obvious that no one wants to find himself in such a position, but the fear of cuckoldry seems to be capable of driving even kings mad with fear. How much of this fear is exaggerated in Shakespeare’s plays? In a world without paternity tests, I suppose that the idea of giving your life’s earnings away to another man’s son is scary, but why was the distrust for women so prevalent? Maybe it’s a societal thing. Perhaps in today’s society, because gender and role are not as synonymous as they used to be, we just can’t understand it. The Elizabethan-Jacobean sexes had very clear, different roles. Perhaps, because of these differences, they didn’t understand each other the way men and women do today, and this lack of understanding led to fear. Even so, today men and women have more than enough communication issues as things stand. I truly can’t even imagine how things would be if the communication gap between the sexes was even larger. Perhaps we’d drive each other mad.
