The Anatomy of Melancholy

Husband and cuckold seem to have been interchangeable terms in that age. The emperors themselves wore Actaeon’s badge. How many Caesars could I list together, and what a catalogue of horned kings and princes appears in every history! Agamemnon, Menelaus and Philip of Greece; Ptolemy of Egypt; Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Augustus, Antony, Antoninus, and so on—all wore fine plumes of bulls’ feathers in their crests. The bravest soldiers and most heroic spirits could not escape it. They have been both agents and victims in this business: they have either given horns or received them.

King Arthur, whom we call one of the Nine Worthies, for all his great valour was shamefully treated by Mordred, one of his Round Table knights; and Guithera, or Helena Alba, his beautiful wife, as Leland interprets her name, was a thoroughly honest woman. “I would gladly spare the injured majesty of heroines,” says my author, “if historical truth did not tug at my ear”: I could willingly overlook a beautiful lady’s faults, but the laws of history bind me to tell the truth. God knows he wrote it against his will, and I repeat it against mine.

All this time I have not been speaking of our own age. We have good, honest, virtuous men and women, restrained by reputation, zeal, fear of God, religion and superstition. Yet, for all that, we have too many knights of this order, knighted by their wives, and many good women wronged by dissolute husbands. In some places, with some people, you might as well order them to carry water in a sieve as to keep themselves faithful.

What is a man to do in such a case? What remedy is there? How is he to find relief? By seeking a divorce? That is hard to achieve. “If not chastely, at least cautiously”: they manage the affair so cunningly that, though it is as common as simony and as plain as the nose on a man’s face, it cannot be clearly proved, nor are they likely to be caught in the act. They will have some rogue of a Gallus to keep watch, or, like that Roman Sulpitia, have everything secured,

Lest he see her stripped of her Cadurcian linen, Lying naked with Calenus.

Her husband will scarcely catch her, however watchful he is. Far better, then, to put up with it: the more he struggles over it, the more he will publicize his own shame. Make a virtue of necessity and conceal it. Yes, but the world notices it; everyone is talking about it. Let them talk as they please. Of whom do they not speak in this way? From the highest to the lowest, they judge everyone so. There is no remedy, then, but patience.

Perhaps it is his own fault, and he has no reason to complain: it is a return in kind; she is bad, and he is worse. “Think: have you not done as much to some of your neighbours? Why do you require from your wife what you will not do yourself?” You roam like a town bull: “Why are you so furious if she strays?”